


Extended Mind Palace Theory

by thewatsonbeekeepers



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: EMP Theory, M/M, Meta, Mind Palace, Sherlock's Mind Palace, not fanfiction
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-31
Updated: 2021-02-14
Packaged: 2021-03-10 17:08:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 32,104
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28450668
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thewatsonbeekeepers/pseuds/thewatsonbeekeepers
Summary: This is not a fanfiction!This is a meta series written by me, @thewatsonbeekeepers, on tumblr and uploaded to ao3 for safekeeping. It runs through the extended mind palace theory of Sherlock Series 4 to deduce the show as a work of insane metatextual proportions. Main trigger warnings here are for mentions of suicide and comas, but nothing graphic. Thanks to @sarahthecoat for suggesting I put this on ao3!
Relationships: Sherlock Holmes/John Watson
Comments: 1
Kudos: 4





	1. A Mental Mindfuck Can Be Nice – an introduction to EMP theory

I amused myself whilst writing this meta by coming up with referential chapter titles – the song to title this chapter can be found here! ([X](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZePn4Luo-7U))

I’m not the first person to propose EMP [extended mind palace] theory and I certainly can’t claim to take the credit for it! After TFP (well, after Apple Tree Yard aired really) I left the fandom, and only rejoined tjlc this year during lockdown and discovered the theory that the entirety of S4 takes place in Sherlock’s Mind Palace, not just TAB, and that even more crucially, the EMP section of the narrative doesn’t happen because of Sherlock’s overdose but rather after Mary shoots him in HLV. Other people have elaborated as to why this is in greater detail and I certainly don’t want to steal their thunder – you can find some of my favourite metas on this here! [X](https://impatient14.tumblr.com/post/155301152143/emp-theory-is-alive-and-thriving) [X](https://xistentialangst.tumblr.com/post/148271216077/emp-just-might-be) [X](https://gosherlocked.tumblr.com/post/137622767856/so-monikakrasnorada-the-7-percent-solution-and) The original founders’ post is here and great [X](https://gosherlocked.tumblr.com/post/137612764721/monikakrasnorada-gosherlocked) – it should be noted that the concept of EMP theory appeared way before the superficial shitshow that was series 4, so it was not invented as a fix-it – far from it!

As well as that, tweets from Arwel Wyn Jones (production designer) and Douglas MacKinnon (TAB director) here [X](https://loveismyrevolution.tumblr.com/post/185892949537/emp-planes-and-what-it-all-means) suggest that a lot of the inconsistencies that make HLV onwards quite dreamlike are absolutely deliberate, which has never been explained in the context of the show. In fact, Douglas MacKinnon specifically suggests that the plane could be in Sherlock’s mind, which has no bearing on the superficial plot unless you buy into EMP theory. We’ve also already been shown that the modern day, particularly when it’s fucky, can be in a mind palace illusion in TAB, and we can read that as a kind of rehearsal for the proper fucky mind palace stuff in S4, a clue that everything is not as it seems – much like the Mayfly Man’s murder rehearsal in TSoT.

It's worth pointing out that there are several different versions of EMP theory – I personally subscribe to the idea that this is Sherlock’s mind palace after being shot by Mary, but there are plenty of popular theories on John’s ‘Mind Bungalow’, blog theory, which I don’t want to dismiss out of hand. However, I think the obsession with the figure of Sherlock Holmes and who that might be throughout the fourth series is thematically consistent with it being from Sherlock’s perspective, as is the precedent from TAB.

The other thing I want to lay on the table as foundational to this theory is the fandom’s obsession with TPLoSH [1970 Billy Wilder queer Holmes adaptation, The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes]. Mofftiss have long stated their love for TPLoSH and even that it is the adaptation that has most inspired them, and I don’t know a single tjlcer who doesn’t have this quotation from Wilder emblazoned onto their memory.

_I should have been more daring. I have this theory. I wanted to have Holmes homosexual and not admitting it to anyone, including maybe even himself. The burden of keeping it secret was the reason he took dope._ [X](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Private_Life_of_Sherlock_Holmes)

What I’m proposing here is that whilst we’ve thought about this quote quite a lot, we’ve always focused on the first half – that Sherlock Holmes is a homosexual – and not the second, which is that that’s the reason he’s on dope. We talk a bit about Sherlock being upset in HLV about John’s marriage and that being why he turns back to drugs, and likewise when TAB first aired a lot of people (myself included) thought he was ODing because he wasn’t going to see John again. I now think – and will provide evidence through the meta! – that it isn’t his feelings of (seemingly) unrequited love which are sending him to drugs, nor that the EMP is a place where he’s discovering his feelings – my meta here [X](https://thewatsonbeekeepers.tumblr.com/post/618469147393818624/tsot-meta) is not the first to point out that Sherlock almost definitely deduces his own feelings for John in TSoT, in a case of the worst timing in television history. Instead, much like Wilder’s Holmes, I think our Sherlock is dealing with a huge amount of shame and internalised homophobia, which has metafictionally* been building up since Conan Doyle started writing – hence the trip back to 1895 in TAB. S4 is about breaking through over a century of Holmes adaptations which have formed Sherlock’s own version of himself, so that he can break out of them into a ‘Private Life’ outside of established canon.

*Metafictionality is the defining idea around my EMP theory, so for anybody who’s not familiar I’m going to do a quick run down. The idea behind metafictionality is that Sherlock is aware of itself as being a work of fiction and deliberately plays with that – in this case, I’m arguing that the character Sherlock is subconsciously aware of the history of book/film/tv adaptations of Sherlock Holmes, and his existence outside Sherlock builds up to create his internalised homophobia. Sounds mad? Maybe. But stick with me here. The reason it’s taking so long for Sherlock to process his sexuality is not just because he’s repressed, but because he’s dealing with the weight of other Holmes adaptations – which is the reason arguably that a modern audience would also take so long to accept it, longer than were this character not such a huge part of the Western psyche.

My aims from this meta:

1\. To prove that tjlc remains endgame (eh, if there’s a series 5)

2\. To show that s4 is about Sherlock trying to break out of his MP coma after being shot by Mary

3\. That s4 engages with the history of Sherlock Holmes adaptations through the character of Sherlock investigating his psyche

4\. That in the real (non-MP) world, John is suicidal, and Sherlock has to wake up to save him.

Chapter 1 – A Mental Mindfuck Can Be Nice: a quick summary of EMP theory

Chapter 2 – Look up here, I’m in Heaven: the height metaphor

Chapter 3 – Death Cannot Stop True Love [HLV 1/1]

Chapter 4 – It is always 1895 [TAB 1/1]

Chapter 5 – Hey, Soul Sister: Who is Eurus?

Chapter 6 – So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish [TST ½]

Chapter 7 – There’s Something About Mary [TST 2/2]

Chapter 8 – Dream a Little Dream of Me: parallels with Doctor Who

Chapter 9 – Rock’n’roll Suicide [TLD ½]

Chapter 10 – Oh No Love, You’re Not Alone [TLD 2/2]

Chapter 11 – The Importance of Being Earnest [TFP 1/3]

Chapter 12 – Three Men in a Boat [TFP 2/3]

Chapter 13 – Out of My Dreams [TFP 3/3]

I’ll (ideally) be uploading a chapter a day for the next 13 days. Some of these chapters will contain links to later chapters; if that chapter isn’t uploaded yet, I’ll add in the link retrospectively, so that might be why the links don’t all work on first read. With chapters that have an episode in parentheses beside, I strongly recommend either watching the episode before reading the meta, or even better to do a simultaneous read and watch through with your finger on the pause button. The only episode which doesn’t do a play by play is TLD ½ , purely for time reasons (my college term starts very soon and I really needed this meta put to bed for the sake of my degree!). The other thing worth saying is that if you want this meta as a word document for some reason, drop me a message – I’m more than happy to share it that way as well. It is a cool 50k so takes some reading. This chapter has been a bit of a nothing, but I hope it lays the groundwork for what to expect from the next 12 – I’ll see you over the next 12 days!


	2. Look Up Here, I'm in Heaven - the height metaphor

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The metaphor of height/going to heaven.

[The chapter title comes from David Bowie’s _Lazarus_. _Lazarus_ is a cracking song, and you should listen to it. [X](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-JqH1M4Ya8) CN: death, disturbing imagery]

This chapter has a CN for death (although to be fair, the whole meta does) – it’s analysing the literal peaks and troughs (height is important in this episode) that Sherlock goes through in order to look at how close he is to dying throughout.

In my reading, EMP theory begins once Mary shoots Sherlock in HLV – I’ve linked the reasons for this in Chapter 1 [X](https://thewatsonbeekeepers.tumblr.com/post/630150674349490176/chapter-1-a-mental-mindfuck-can-be-nice-an), so I’m not going to run through them again here. I think Sherlock comes the closest to death that we see him in the EMP at the end of HLV – if you remember, he’s been put on a plane in ‘exile’ by Mycroft, but in reality is being sent to his death. This plane/height image is really important. In the Christian tradition (and therefore majority Western tradition that the writers are writing in), the sky is associated with heaven – Sherlock’s plane taking off being synonymous with his death seems a pretty straightforward metaphor in that regard. (It’s even one that’s used in _Cats_ , though I don’t know if that’s a good thing.) Further to that – it ties in nicely with Sherlock being ‘high’ through a lot of s4, which represents the moments in which he is most repressed and his repression is most tied to self-harm. We have further ideas to buttress the height/aeroplane metaphor with, however – do you remember the plane in ASiB?

Sure, as I recall it never gets off the ground. But **everybody on it is dead**. Aeroplanes have an association with death already in this show, and the choice to put Sherlock on a plane rather than lock him up for four minutes or anything equivalent – and probably less expensive to shoot – suggests a deliberate throwback. We’re supposed to think of it as a kind of metal coffin.

[Obviously, there’s another, more notable use of an aeroplane in the programme – you can see where I’m going here. But bear with me – there’s more first.]

I want to quickly talk about what grounds Sherlock’s aeroplane. Moriarty appears on screens everywhere, and then we have the following exchange between Sherlock and Mycroft. I’ve already made a post about this that’s done the rounds on tumblr [X](https://thewatsonbeekeepers.tumblr.com/post/618711183346794496), so if you already know this bit you’re ahead of the game.

As far as I can tell, nobody ever tells Sherlock that Moriarty is back. It’s possible Mycroft tells him offscreen, or that he googles it from his phone, given that he’s already breaking flight rules, but given that it’s the entire trigger for TAB, it seems a pretty odd thing to leave out. In EMP theory, it’s also the thing that downs his plane – in terms of the plane metaphor as well as literally, it stops him from dying. It’s pivotal, but we don’t see it. I therefore want to hypothesise – _what does it mean if Sherlock is never told that Moriarty is back?_

The first thing it tells us is that Sherlock is in his Mind Palace, because he knows that Moriarty is back without needing to be told. But the second is that Mycroft, the brain, is waking Sherlock from his dying stupor to tell him that England needs him, meaning that Sherlock’s brain equates Moriarty coming back with the word ‘England’ in some way. Perhaps this is a tenuous link, but the seed is planted back from ASiP, when we’re taught to associate John with his armchair.

Don’t mind me, I’m just crying. Basically, Sherlock knows that John is in danger and that’s what pulls him back from the brink – and we know it’s serious, because Mycroft, the **brain** , is warning him. Via call.

The fear of Moriarty coming back might sound like a tenuous symbol for John being in danger, but when we probe deeper the two are actually quite obviously equivalent. The only threat that Moriarty has ever posed to Sherlock is a threat to John’s life – the Semtex, burning the heart out of him, John Watson is definitely in danger, the sniper at the fall. This is Sherlock’s pressure point, and by getting rid of Moriarty, he’s getting rid of any danger to John – we know from his drug abuse etc. that his regard for himself is much lower. So Sherlock being woken from the dead to save John makes complete sense. He died for him, and now he’ll resurrect himself for him.

There are several layers to how John is in danger – the bottom one, which for me s4 is about getting to the heart of, is that without Sherlock John is suicidal. This was established in ASiP, and I believe is the metaphorical plot of TLD (see Chapter 9 X). However, there’s also the problem of Mary, newly discovered as an assassin, and Sherlock trying to work out who she is and where she comes from – more on that later, but there’s certainly a chance she’s linked to Moriarty, given the Morstan/Moran connections. ‘Did you miss me?’ works for both of those layers – the danger John is in from criminals is something that was really apparent in s1 and 2, but John’s endangerment from suicide is also something that was there at the beginning of the series. Sherlock changed these things – and didn’t realise he was the changing factor, but something in his subconscious is telling him that with him gone, John Watson is once again in danger.

So, his plane comes back to the runway – still in his mind palace, of course, but coming down. TAB – of which more on later – seems to be about the return of Moriarty, and Sherlock puzzling through it, which is jarringly absent from TST and TLD if you’re reading it on a surface level – it takes TAB for Sherlock to puzzle through this and to pull him down from death, as he comes to understand the Moriarty threat. This all sounds pretty vague – the TAB chapter will deal with it in more detail. For now, let’s move on to the other places where the height/heaven metaphor comes into s4.

One thing that several meta-writers have pointed out is that Ella’s office is… fucky. It’s not the same office as John repeatedly visits outside the MP – it’s possible that Ella has moved premises, but it’s a weird thing to draw such obvious attention to by the weirdness of the room. This isn’t a subtle change, like John and Mary’s place, it’s a really dissonant one, and the oddness of the room pulls our attention towards a character and space that by rights belong in the background of the story. It’s a really odd move – and that’s why I’m so convinced that it’s important. 

It looks like Heaven, for want of a better description. The window with the light streaming through looks like the very top of a church window, and the beams suggest that the ceiling is like a kind of spire – and the spire in a church is meant to be closer to heaven, that’s part of the imagery. So there’s that side of things, and I really don’t think that’s a coincidence. However, the even weirder part is the partitioning of the room, for want of a better word. The wall ends at about chair height, and from there to the floor is – nothing? These aren’t mirrors because the chairs aren’t reflected. I have **never** seen a room partitioned like this, and nor has anyone I’ve shown the image to – again, it draws attention to itself. If the creative team had wanted us to take this scene at face value, they would have put Ella in an office. This is not a psychiatrist’s office. The partitions mean that it isn’t even private.

I don’t know if I’m right about the partitions, but there’s only one thing they remind me of, and that’s a closing door. It’s a trope in an adventure film – I first saw it in _Indiana Jones_ , but it’s in many a movie. It also features in _Doctor Who_ on multiple occasions.

It’s the moment when the door is coming down and you only have a few seconds to get under it, otherwise you die. Indiana Jones famously goes back for his hat. That one. That’s what the space under the partition looks like. Sherlock, thinking he’s solved the case of Norbury and therefore Mary (more in Chapter 7 X) is ready to pop off – he’s nearly gone. But in a moment of self-interrogation – making sure he got everything right, that John’s safe now – he realises he isn’t, and so he comes down. That sinking downwards is represented by the water imagery, as he sinks deep into his subconscious – LSiT has written a fantastic meta on water in S4 which you can read here [X](https://loudest-subtext-in-tv.tumblr.com/post/155883533189/emp-theory-from-hlv-to-tld), as I’m loath to take credit for this idea!

I’m going to talk about water a lot more in the chapters on TFP, because of John in the well and pirates and **so much** , but the obvious thing to talk about now is the plane in TFP.

This is a point where surface level plot breaks down – because this **cannot** be in Eurus’s mind. When we watch film/tv, we make one of two assumptions – either we have the omnipotent view, like in most films, where we’re guided by the director but everything we see is ultimately objectively true, or we see through somebody else’s eyes (rarer). These can be played with – think of a film like _The Usual Suspects_ (please skip to the next paragraph if you haven’t seen this film because it’s fantastic) where the film lets the viewer rest on their laurels and slip into normal, objective viewing patterns when of course it’s a subjective, flashback narrative, which Kevin Spacey is deliberately obscuring to trick an audience. This rug pull can be fantastic, but we don’t have such a rug pull here. Either it’s a poor man’s version, or there’s something else going on. Mug drop.

New paragraph – spoilers gone. Moments where the perspective was actually subjective and we missed it or forgot it are great rug pulls, because the clues are there but we don’t spot them. We love a good unreliable narrator. This isn’t the case here. The plane scene, as visualised, exists only inside Eurus’s head. Eurus is emphatically not our narrator during TFP, so when it comes out that the girl on the plane isn’t real, we just feel lied to.

If we accept that s4 takes place inside Sherlock’s MP, this makes more sense, because all of the characters are manifestations of different parts of Sherlock’s psyche and so he can jump between perspectives. It also means that the terror of being on a crashing plane that Eurus has felt ever since she was a child is not hers – it’s Sherlock’s. If we remember that planes are synonymous with dying in this show, an association that’s reinforced because of the “sleeping” people on the plane, a clear throwback to the dead passengers in ASiB, the climax of S4, when Sherlock is trying to save John and work out his repressed memories, is all fuelled by a child’s nightmare of dying, a terror that has resurfaced.

I think Eurus represents Sherlock’s queer trauma, and I’ll explain that in more detail in Chapter 5 X, which is completely devoted to Eurus. Her representing trauma, though, makes a great deal of sense in this situation. The problem of the plane, the threat that she hinges on, is one that has been repeating and repeating, though repressed, inside Sherlock’s consciousness, and he breaks through it with not only kindness, but the recognition that it is all in Eurus’s (and by extension his) head.

This doesn’t diminish the trauma that Sherlock experiences – one of the things I begrudgingly like about the ending of TFP. Sherlock can’t get rid of the problem and possible danger that is his trauma – but he can stop it from careering to the point of destruction by recognising it, he can learn to live in harmony (see the violin duet) with it, he can accept its existence. Pushing through that trauma is what makes him able to abandon the plane and (we hope) return to the real world.

The positioning of the aeroplane problem in relation to the John-trapped-in-a-well problem is also pretty important. I’m of the firm belief that Eurus represents queer trauma, and this is the trauma that throughout the entirety of series 4 is both pushing him towards John and blocking him from him. Sherlock needs to wake up to save John, and has to push through the trauma to recognise this – but the trauma is blocking his way. She’s stopping him from helping John – it’s a terrible moment when Sherlock is telling John that he’s busy whilst John is drowning in the well – but it’s also pushing through the aeroplane moment that allows him to save John in the MP. This is the paradox of queer repression, right, and the paradox in Eurus’s behaviour – she’s simultaneously blocking Sherlock and leading him on to the solution.

When Sherlock finally reaches Eurus’s room, he tells her that he’s on the ground and he can bring her down too – and what is most striking is the way Eurus is sitting. She’s actually incredibly grounded, sitting cross-legged on the floor, and given that the house is burned it’s likely that this is the ground floor as well. The dark room is a far cry from the bright lighting of the plane – everything suggests that she’s been pulled back. And of course, the lovely touch that all she needs to do is open her eyes. That’s all the creators have ever been asking people to do – open their eyes to what is hiding in plain sight – and Eurus is allowing Sherlock to see things afresh for the first time. **But also** , this final breakthrough is what’s going to allow Sherlock to open his own eyes, right? So that phrase is doubly powerful.

And there was me hating on TFP for three years. That’s a brief journey through the highs and lows of series 4, though if anyone can explain the planes in TST to me that would be wonderful! The next chapter will do a run through of HLV before we move onto TAB and series 4.


	3. Death Cannot Stop True Love [HLV 1/1]

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A run through of the EMP in HLV - I would recommend having recently viewed HLV for this, or even watching it concurrently with a remote to stop it as it goes along!

_…_[ _All it can do is delay it for a while_](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGZalfcrwSU). Whilst Westley’s hair in that film horribly resembles my lockdown hair, more happily the fantastic movie _The Princess Bride_ continues to resemble _Sherlock_ – there was a very popular meta on the links between the two for a while there that can be found here: [X](https://www.tumbex.com/inevitably-johnlocked.tumblr/post/118236967620/the-princess-bride-moffat-and-tjlc).

This chapter is going to run through EMP theory as it begins, covering mainly the second half of HLV. It’s important to note, however, that the first half of the episode provides a lot of clues about the way certain images function in the mind palace, which backs up EMP theory quite nicely – the last ideas that Sherlock has going around in his brain before he is shot inevitably swirl around in there whilst he’s unconscious and form an important part of the train of association.

I toyed with the entirety of HLV being in EMP, because parts of it are weird (think Magnussen pissing in Baker Street, or the fucky MP glasses), but I ultimately dismissed it, though I’m willing to be challenged on this. I dismissed it as being a part of Sherlock’s post-wedding drug abuse for a few reasons. The first is that we only see Sherlock wake up from his drug abuse, not go into it – EMP is something that’s going to be hard for viewers to swallow, and Mofftiss are actually quite good at dropping big hints and drawing attention to the important bits along the way. That’s really not the case in the crack den, which is well integrated into the plot and has no traces of Sherlock’s mind palace. The second is that, actually, the premise of HLV is far too integrated into the main plot of s3 to be entirely MP – the CAM stuff and Janine at John and Mary’s wedding could be Sherlock extrapolating, but it seems like a bizarre extrapolation to make given how much fuckier the s4 mysteries are (London aquarium, Culverton’s drugging, the entirety of TFP) - the only MP fuckiness we get in HLV really takes place after Mary shoots Sherlock, like the restaurant scene with CAM or the Appledore Vaults being his MP. Mary shooting Sherlock also has far too many throwbacks with Norbury and Eurus in s4 to be completely irrelevant. So, with that in mind – let's go.

To understand what’s going on in HLV, we’re going to need to understand the metafiction going on – and this is where a good knowledge of acd canon comes in. Most of HLV isn’t actually based on _His Last Bow_ , but on _Charles Augustus Milverton_[X](https://sherlock-holm.es/stories/pdf/a4/1-sided/chas.pdf). To give a brief synopsis (although I would thoroughly recommend this story, not least because it’s incredibly queer) Holmes is engaged by Lady Eva Brackwell (Lady Smallwood in our world) to stop Milverton (Magnussen) from showing her husband some indiscreet letters she wrote to a squire some years ago. Holmes realises he can’t get Milverton under the law, so gets engaged in disguise to Milverton’s housemaid (Janine) in order to break in and burgle him. Watson agrees to come too. When they break in, Milverton is talking to another woman (Mary) who shoots him in revenge for Milverton’s use of information causing her husband’s suicide. She escapes and Holmes and Watson burn all of Milverton’s letters, and then escape. They refuse to help Lestrade solve the murder.

All of this lines up pretty evenly with HLV until the moment when Sherlock is shot. Admittedly there are minor changes to the Smallwood plot line (who committed what indiscretion), but these are minor and seem to be to make the plot work in the modern day – nobody cares if someone has a working-class ex anymore. But we get **huge** canon divergence from the shooting scene onwards.

Sherlock believes that Mary is Smallwood because of her perfume. This is a rational enough assumption to make, but it’s not just based on perfume. We know that since Lady Smallwood has engaged Holmes, Lord Smallwood has committed suicide – so she fits the profile of the blackmailee from _Charles Augustus Milverton_ perfectly. She fits the patterns that Sherlock expects to see in his deductions. Mary does not – our first point of canon divergence. It sets up a painful parallel between John and Mary and the couple from _Charles Augustus Milverton_ ; they never name the indiscretion that led the husband in acd canon to kill himself, and given the company that Doyle kept (Wilde, Douglases including Lord Francis Douglas, who was thought to have killed himself shortly after being ennobled – much like the unnamed nobleman - because of his sexuality) it seems reasonable to assume this silence is euphemistic. Let that mirror linger in your thoughts, because it’s important.

Mary is the housemaid who has broken in to shoot Magnuessen/Milverton – so far so good. Although Holmes was hidden in the original stories, he was still present and sympathetic; the logical canon-following route here is for Mary to kill Magnussen, and that’s exactly what Sherlock expects her to do – but she doesn’t. She shoots him instead, and Sherlock can’t understand this. As we’ll see, he spends the rest of HLV trying to justify this pattern-breaking to himself, and is finally unable to.

Once Sherlock has been shot, the Molly/Anderson/Jim/Mycroft section which sets up EMP is fairly self-explanatory – the only thing I want to dive into here to point out is that this is the first appearance of Jim in the EMP, as a kind of restrained beast, and his most pivotal line is the fear he represents: _John Watson is definitely in danger_. This sets up what he’s going to represent for the rest of the EMP sequence. Other people have delved into the rest of this section before, and extensively – I don’t have a huge amount to add. We know John is in danger from Magnussen, because that’s ostensibly why Mary was there, but she didn’t seem to care as much as the housemaid from the initial stories did. We also know from the original stories that Magnussen has the power to make John suicidal, but in this story he hasn’t yet – but because of this, Sherlock senses that the danger is much more than a loss of reputation. It’s heart-re-starting-ly important.

The next bit I want to jump into is Sherlock’s conversation with Janine in the hospital. A lot of people have argued that this is one of the only real moments following Mary shooting Sherlock, and that Janine fiddling with the taps is part of what induces Sherlock’s fucky mind palace wanderings. I don’t buy into that theory – the more I think about this scene, the less it makes sense as being real in the context of EMP theory. The first reason for this is, very simply, that it means Sherlock has woken up after the realisation that John is in danger. The driving idea behind EMP theory is that Sherlock has to spend s4 making that realisation and trying to wake up – having that actually happen at the very start of EMP, only to be aborted, is bizarre. Secondly, it completely negates the idea that Mary’s actions are possibly fatal, which is a theme that reverberates through s4 (and all the chapters of this meta) - if Janine fiddling with the taps is what pushes Sherlock back into his MP, then by rights Janine should appear in S4, instead of the preoccupation it has with Mary and shooting.

What, then, is going on here? Sherlock is told by MP!Jim that John is in danger – and then imagines he wakes up. In his MP, Janine appears, puts him in pain and puts him back under. She, then, is the reason he can’t wake up. Janine has been Sherlock’s beard, and it’s quite possible to read her as being a symbol of Sherlock’s repression, but I think that’s a simplification; discounting TAB, Janine doesn’t appear again, and even then it’s minimal, whereas s4 is literally built around the concept of repression. As I go into in a lot more detail in chapter 9 (X), which is about the use of drugs to mask our darkest secrets in TLD, it’s **the drugs** that represent Sherlock’s deepest repression, in this case the morphine that he uses to mask the pain. Having Janine be the one who is fucking with the taps simply makes the link clearer, particularly when we might not associate hospital drugs with the other kind of drugs that Sherlock normally takes to take the pain away – however, it’s clear that the drugs that anaesthesise his pain do the same job as Janine – hide his queerness. Janine turned vindictive causes him intense pain, and he needs to turn back to the drugs to slip back under. Bearding was always temporary in this show, at least for Sherlock; drug abuse is a consistent problem and becomes a running metaphor for Sherlock’s repression in the EMP.

Janine being a symbol here helps me to make sense of the couple of lines that didn’t make sense to me otherwise. If Janine were real, getting rid of the bees would be awful – she gets the future our boys want and she destroys it. But if she’s a symbol in Sherlock’s mind of that bearding, and a barrier to waking up and saving John, then her sitting there, pushing him back into a coma and tearing away the future he longs for – that makes a lot of sense, and is 100% more devastating. The other line that has never made sense to me is Janine telling Sherlock that he could have just been honest with her, that she knows what kind of man he is. _This line doesn’t make sense unless she means a gay man._ I would be really interested to know how else this can be construed. This line can make sense in the real world if we accept that Janine is working with Mary – which must be true anyway, because otherwise Mary can’t get to CAM – and **also** wants Sherlock to get involved in that situation, although God knows why – the Janine-is-Jim's-sister theory feels like it might work here, but I don’t think there’s enough evidence for me to unravel it. If Janine genuinely does open the door out of affection for Sherlock, regardless of her relationship with Mary (the two aren’t mutually exclusive), Janine knowing Sherlock is gay doesn’t make sense **at all** \- but Sherlock’s mind turning that beard back on himself to mock him? Absolutely makes sense. Remember, this is the loathing that pushes him back into the deep coma – this scene is really pivotal.

Sherlock vanishing from the hospital bed, despite being nearly dead, is pretty much medically impossible, and is probably the first impossible thing that we see happen in EMP – but it should be a red flag that that’s where we are. It’s also nice and symbolic of his movement away from that surface level, a level which we see him return to briefly in the hospital scenes in TLD when he realises his place in John’s heart. Touching stuff.

We then move into Sherlock’s interrogation of Mary behind the facade of the houses. In case we missed the reference, Mofftiss actually have the phrase _the empty house_ used, a reference to _The Adventure of the Empty House_[X](https://etc.usf.edu/lit2go/178/the-return-of-sherlock-holmes/3226/chapter-i-the-adventure-of-the-empty-house/) _,_ the story on which TEH is meant to be based. It is telling, though, that very little of _The Empty House_ features in TEH, other than that it is the moment when Sherlock comes back. Others have commented on the minor relevance of Moran to the story and hypothesised that Mary is the real Moran – I think that the facade scene presents that as a genuine possibility. I don’t want to overstate the similarities that _The Empty House_ bears to HLV, but Mofftiss do draw attention to it – and there is something interesting about the criminal being revealed by Holmes only after the criminal thinks they’ve killed him. **That** bears a particular relevance to Mary – and links her to Moriarty as his potential second-in-command. The most important link, however, is that in _The Empty House,_ Holmes tricks Moran into incriminating himself by creating a dummy Holmes for Moran to shoot at. It’s true that Mary doesn’t shoot at dummy Sherlock (John) here, but the dummy is set up to incriminate her, and she acknowledges that this is a basic trick, one she should have known before. The links of the empty house and the dummy, both made explicitly familiar in the dialogue, do a lot to link Mary’s character to acdcanon!Moran.

This, however, all takes place in Sherlock’s brain. In several scenes, we’ve had Sherlock engage with two concepts in his mind that he can’t know about; one is Sebastian Moran in _The Empty House_ , which only takes place in ACD canon, but even if you think that link is tenuous, he’s also engaged with his canon future as a beekeeper in Sussex. And then, on top of this, there is the problem of Mary versus the housemaid from _Charles Augustus Milverton._ My suggestion is that these aren’t just jokes put in by Mofftiss to say look-we've-read-the-books – Sherlock's mind is actually using the bees from the original stories to negotiate his relationship with his sexuality, and _The Empty House_ to try to understand Mary’s motives. This is confirmed on a grand scale by TAB – he goes back to ACD canon!Holmes to navigate the problems of his everyday life – so Sherlock is not just a modern Sherlock Holmes, he is on some level self-aware of his existence as a fictional character. As we’ll see going through, his awareness of the existing canon of stories is fascinating and tied up in his repression – how do we break out of canon character, and what has canon been hiding, are two questions which repeatedly come to the fore. Mary is the character who most consistently breaks these canon expectations – a lot of TAB is about this – and that’s something he really struggles to contend with, and is one of the reasons that the reality of canon!verse starts to break down in TAB – it's not sustainable, and it doesn’t tell the full story. These two moments early on in EMP show him negotiating his identity and his experiences in his mind in relation to what he knows about Sherlock Holmes – an early iteration of a theme that’s going to become much larger.

The first thing Sherlock does after being pushed under by Janine is go and interrogate who Mary is in his brain, whilst also working out her impact on John. Sherlock comes up with a pretty reasonable background for who she is in the Leinster Gardens scene, but this isn’t really what’s important – it's the _The Empty House_ parallel which sees him subconsciously making the link to Moriarty. ACDcanon!Moran, unlike bbc!Moran, was the last assassin sent after Sherlock from Moriarty’s network – this means that the dismantling-Moriarty's-network plot from the start of TEH becomes more than a fill-in-the-blanks montage, it means that the show retains its key villain to the end – it structurally **works,** in a way that other plot-level ideas haven’t. [@ eurus holmes. anyway]

Something that’s interesting here, is that there is a real shift away from the implications of the dummy in acd canon. In acd canon, Moran attempts to murder Holmes, which is a way of catching him in the act and sending him to prison. This is about catching Mary in the act in a similar sense, but it’s about being caught by John. This is interesting, because it shows that Sherlock’s priorities have shifted from acd canon – or, more accurately, we’re seeing the priorities that weren’t reported in the Strand. The emotional impact on John is far more important than the legal ramifications – and this in itself is the shift which the creators have been pretty emphatic about taking from the original stories.

John often represents the heart in Sherlock’s MP – I haven’t quite worked out how to distinguish between heart!John and Sherlock’s imagined John yet, and am flying on instinct, which is definitely not sustainable! But it strikes me that a lot about HLV and TST is about understanding the impact of this shooting on John, and that therefore this needs to be John as Sherlock imagines him.

We’re still with Sherlock’s imagined John as we move into “the Watsons’ domestic” in 221B – but, as so many have pointed out, for a domestic between the Watsons, they feature very little as a couple! The core emotional dialogue is often said to come between John and Sherlock, but despite Martin Freeman’s **excellent** performance in this scene, that’s not strictly true either. The centre of this scene is Sherlock explaining John’s love for Mary. It’s not about the Watsons – it's about Sherlock understanding what’s going on, which fits into EMP theory exactly. I firmly believe that Sherlock begins his EMP trip believing that John loves Mary, and slowly unravels the threads to realise that it’s actually him John cares about, and this scene is testament to the first part – the deduction that he makes about John loving Mary is flawless, but despite explicitly referencing himself, he fails to see the obvious – _hiding in plain sight_ \- that such a deduction could equally be applied to himself. He’ll get there in the end (TLD), but right now, that’s what makes this scene so painful for me.

Turning Mary into a client is about moving into the rational part of Sherlock’s brain, trying not to let emotion cloud it, even though it’s incongruous and unworkable. We’ll see Sherlock’s brain and heart slowly integrate, finally uniting in TFP, but for now he thinks rationality is the way forward. This also helps us to set out a framework for what happens with Mary in the EMP – clients are deduced, worked out, they present problems - never forget Mary being framed as the abominable bride – and that’s what is happening here. She is the first problem of the extended mind palace to be solved.

But this scene is metafictional too, because it gets to the core nub of Mary – as John puts it, _she wasn’t supposed to be like that_. And, canonically, he’s right. If we follow acd!canon, Mary is not meant to be an assassin, but more importantly for HLV, she’s also supposed to save her husband. She’s meant to be all-out devoted shoot-Magnussen type – but instead she shoots Sherlock. When John says that, then, it’s not just a nod to an updated show – it’s a genuine problem that Sherlock has to contend with, because in neither acd!Mary scenario nor housemaid!Mary scenario is she obeying the framework of a woman who loves her husband. This failing marriage is not in the stories, it’s not supposed to happen, and things that come outside of established canon come outside of Sherlock’s pre-programmed mould – we can think of this as a way of thinking about our own childhood programming to be straight/cis/etc., but in a more self-conscious, literary way!

And then, Sherlock’s response: _you chose her_. That’s why she’s different, and this is actually a vital line. It suggests that the programmed canon that we know these boys follow, because they have to – that’s not what this show is about. Our characters are agents, and for the first time in history, their lives are dictated by free choice. John chose this Mary, not the Mary of canon – and Sherlock himself makes explicit the comparison between John choosing Mary and John choosing Sherlock. The heart of the story is the choices that can be made for the first time. How incredibly exciting.

The ambulance people coming into Baker Street (seemingly without the door being unlocked?) is, I think, the real world blending with the mind palace world here – although not paramedics, there are people currently trying to restart Sherlock’s heart, and this scene shows us that he’s trying hard inside his brain, he’s working with them – he really doesn’t want to die. The idea of the outside world taking on a physical form in his MP is not incredibly hard to believe – I really recommend watching s02e02 of _Inside No. 9_ , written by Mark Gatiss’s _League of Gentlemen_ co-stars Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton, an episode which pulls this off marvellously, although with a big cn: for death. In this moment in _Sherlock_ , we get the lovely lines

 **Sherlock** She saved my life.

 **John** She shot you.

 **Sherlock** Eh – mixed messages, I grant you.

These lines are delivered so quickly between the two of them that it feels like Sherlock is talking to himself, like Mary isn’t even in the room. The way BC delivers ‘mixed messages’ – it’s as though there’s still a problem, bbc!Mary hasn’t been reconciled to good!Mary yet.

The next section on our whistle-stop tour is Christmas with Mummy and Daddy. Plenty of people have pointed out how Mummy and Daddy are very clear mirrors for our boys – you can see here [X](https://sherlockmeta.tumblr.com/post/75418131089/the-holmes-parents-and-how-they-mirror-john-and), or you can just look at this picture to be honest.

The Christmas scene doesn’t make sense in the timeline – there's a great timeline diagram here [X](https://obotligtnyfiken.tumblr.com/post/146524519488/straight-ahead-or-two-steps-forward-two-steps) that shows how much fuckier than any other episode HLV is (excluding TSoT and everything post s3), and that doesn’t even take into account all of the jumping between scenes that we see in the Christmas bit. Jumping from Leinster Gardens to Christmas to Baker Street and back several times is chronologically odd and doesn’t seem to serve a purpose, except to show that the rift between John and Mary has lasted for months – and even that didn’t need such a complex interweaving of flashbacks that is so at odds with the show. It’s also at odds with the plot – why on earth did Mummy and Daddy invite John for Christmas, if he’s no longer living with Sherlock, and even stranger, why did they invite Mary if John and Mary haven’t been on speaking terms for months? This isn’t the way human beings behave. There’s also an old adage in writing which says to never move a conversation to a new place – it’s a waste of time and space. Have the conversation here, or have it there. Don’t abort it for no reason – and that’s exactly what they do here. Mofftiss are pretty experienced, and I’m inclined to believe that they’ve done it for a reason.

So, in MP terms, why does Sherlock gravitate towards his family home instead of Baker Street as the location to unravel John’s relationship with Mary? Bearing in mind that this is a continuation of the interrogation of their relationship, it seems interesting that he chooses to juxtapose them to the only loving couple we see in this television programme. Like a lot of parallels in EMP, this is something that our dads choose to draw our attention to; Daddy says to Mary “you’re the sane one”, as though every happy relationship has a sane one and a mad genius. And they draw attention to it again – Mary points out that Sherlock brought them here to see a fine example of happily married life.

Except, of course, like so much of this interrogation of John and Mary’s relationship in HLV and onwards, this doesn’t quite ring true. Because, of course, there is no mad genius in the Watsons’ relationship, and in terms of sanity Mary is certainly not the sane one. It’s like Sherlock is trying to fit them into the domestic bliss mould, but they just won’t quite go there. The comparison won’t quite be made.

The conversation between Sherlock and Mycroft, who has been established as his brain in TSoT (I cannot find this meta! Where Mycroft is brain and John is heart! Can anyone help?), is pretty straightforward – the brain is interrogating Sherlock’s obsession with the Magnussen case and why he can’t just let it go, and the emotion we see here from Sherlock is more powerful than pretty much anything we get in real life. I actually think this scene is one of the most vulnerable moments he has in the show – and there’s no way that vulnerability would be to Mycroft in real life. There’s also, crucially, no reason why MI6 should actually want Sherlock dead this early. It’s another tell-tale sign that the surface plot doesn’t make sense – we should be looking deeper. Sherlock has just brought down a terrorist network – MI6 should love him. What Mycroft is actually putting forward is that already, way before Sherlock kills Magnussen, pretty much as soon as he enters EMP this is a two-way fork. He can choose to die at any point. But he doesn’t.

There’s something that I really don’t understand here, though, which I think is important – Sherlock drugging the family with the help of Wiggins. This motif of drugging is something which comes back time and again to represent Sherlock’s repression – but here he’s not drugged. Wiggins is also a symbol of repression, but again he’s completely sober. Any thoughts on this would be much appreciated – I don’t like loose ends, and I don’t believe that another use of drugs is insignificant!

Then we have a quick flashback to the canteen scene. A lot of EMP theory has drawn on the canteen scene, and how phenomenally dreamlike the entire situation is. There is no way this can take place in Speedy’s – in terms of the timeline, it can’t even take place in the hospital canteen! However, it seems to draw on a mental image of Speedy’s because of the visual similarities between them (referenced in this meta, although this meta makes the argument for the reality of the scene [X](https://thefakefangirl.tumblr.com/post/95830940391/more-thoughts-on-magnussen-the-canteen-scene-and)). Magnussen doesn’t seem to even have a bruise, despite being battered by Mary’s gun. **This scene cannot exist**. Magnussen picking at Sherlock’s food has often been seen as a metaphor for Sherlock being sexually assaulted whilst comatose, which is something I buy into – the food=sex metaphor has been striking from the beginning, and it suits Magnussen’s power play. It’s also quite possible in this scene that Sherlock thinks that everything fucky is real, and the absolute fuckiness of this scene draws it out – this is the scene that foreshadows the realisation that Magnussen is working from his MP, and of course that’s a realisation that Sherlock needs to make himself. The scene opens with a moment of dislocation – is this the hospital canteen or not? – and is about Sherlock working out what’s happening to him.

What’s really striking is that John has brought his gun to Christmas lunch, however. Bear in mind John-being-suicidal is the realisation that Sherlock is going to come to in TLD, but it’s prefigured here. We haven’t seen John’s gun since ASiP, when it was used to indicate that he was suicidal. It’s suddenly come back, but Sherlock misses its significance – he expects John to have it, but he doesn’t focus on the significance of the gun itself. He’s still thinking in terms of Mary and Magnussen. What’s significant is that John throws him the coat, which has the gun weighing down in its pocket. This prefigures _that_ scene in TLD -

Faith!Eurus, who is a mirror for John in TLD, is thrown the bag, and we see Sherlock weigh it and then realise there’s a gun in it – too late. A bag is the female equivalent of a coat (*cries about pockets*) and the throwing motif with the heavy gun inside it is a clear link between the two moments. Sherlock didn’t recognise the significance of the gun in the first one, possibly because he couldn’t process the situation without mirrors (more on the importance of Eurus as a series of heterosexual mirrors later). When he realises in TLD that he’s made a mistake, that there’s something he’s missed, the implication isn’t that he’s missed it in his analysis of Faith!Eurus, because in no sense of the word does Faith!Eurus exist. What it means is that he missed it in his first, cursory analysis of John. Not the heaviness, but exactly what it meant. The symbols of John’s suicidal ideation start to appear and threaten to break in right up until the end of TLD – this is arguably the first point we start to see them.

Hypothesis theory – that Sherlock is running simulations in his MP – is not something I hold with through all of EMP, but I do hold with it to the end of HLV. It’s something that we know Sherlock does in real life because of THoB, both in acd!canon and in bbc!canon – he stages something in order to prove it to himself. In this case, he’s not able to see the war between Mary and Magnussen play out, so he’s running it himself, and we’ve already seen him desperately trying to prove Mary’s innocence, and more than that her love for John. But this trip to Appledore will prove that impossible.

It’s possible that the Appledore Vaults being Magnussen’s MP is the first time that Sherlock recognises that this is a simulation, and that this isn’t real. He certainly looks incredibly distressed, although that could also be because of the immense danger he’s put John in. However, the vaults being a mind palace doesn’t make sense as surface plot, as so many have pointed out – we’ve literally seen the letters before. (I grant that Magnussen could be bluffing, but it seems odd to draw attention to the letters having a physical form nevertheless.) However, the fact that Magnussen’s MP is in vaults underground is really interesting – imagery to do with going deeper and deeper into Sherlock’s mind is pretty much always falling or sinking, as seen in both TAB and TST in particular. That idea of descending into one’s mind is prefigured very neatly here, and should get us thinking about height generally (I’ve talked about the reverse side of this in the previous chapter [X](https://thewatsonbeekeepers.tumblr.com/post/630215578289864704/chapter-2-look-up-here-im-in-heaven-the)). I also think, although am not an expert on sound, that we can hear a slight eerie dripping when Magnussen walks through the vaults, which ties thematically to the water that is linked to falling/sinking in the rest of the EMP.

Fast forward past the face-flicking, and Sherlock shoots Magnussen. This is the culmination of the metafictionality of the episode, and I think it’s really fantastic. The simulation that Sherlock has run to prove that Mary loves John has failed, because the only way to save John is to kill Magnussen and he’s the only one who can do it – so in short, Sherlock becomes the housemaid, not Mary. He takes on the role, and it breaks canon completely. He’s supposed to be above that, disinterested – but instead he becomes the woman who kills out of love for her husband. He is no longer filling the traditional role of Sherlock Holmes in the narrative. He has disproven the point he needed to make – and so, as brain!Mycroft seems to suggest, deeper waters still. The cut to little Louis Moffat screaming in the firing line instead of BC is another hint that this isn’t real – we might just about accept it here as showing Sherlock’s vulnerability, but given that the entirety of series 4 is about childhood trauma coming back up, the resurgence of a screaming child of Sherlock as he recognises his new place in the narrative is brutal. (Yes, Sherlock has a lot of gay trauma – we’ll find out more when we meet Eurus.)

Eurus, incidentally, comes up here – _you know what happened to the other one_. I want to home in, though, on Mycroft’s line about Sherlock, that there’s no prison that he could be incarcerated in. This is a bizarre comment, given the events of TFP – it could just be sloppy writing, sure. Or, again, these inconsistencies are pointing to something else, that Sherrinford isn’t a real place and that Sherlock’s death sentence is not a sentence, but self-imposed.

So much has been said, so eloquently, about the tarmac scene, that I don’t know that there’s much more that I can say. The importance of the plane as being Sherlock going to his death is really important as an image that will repeat later – again, see previous chapter [X](https://thewatsonbeekeepers.tumblr.com/post/630215578289864704/chapter-2-look-up-here-im-in-heaven-the). I’ve also pointed out that there is no point at which Sherlock is told Moriarty is back, yet he seems to know it automatically – another suggestion that this is EMP, and there’s a lot more going on.

The final thing I want to focus on in this episode, though, is the east wind. The east wind is referenced in _His Last Bow_ , which gets very little coverage generally in HLV. _His Last Bow_ is (I believe) the final Holmes story, and the east wind that is coming refers to WW1 – Holmes tells Watson that there is an east wind coming and Watson thinks he means it’s cold, and Holmes laughs and jokes that Watson is a stalwart who will always be there. This is a touching moment to end the stories on, and might remind us of the _It is always 1895_ poem that will become so important in TAB. Except, this time, John accepts that there’s an east wind coming – he references it repeatedly, actually, as a threat, both here and in TFP. The east wind is the wind of change that comes through the changing years in acd!canon. This seems particularly important here – the social changes between 1895 and 2014 are vital for the next episode, highlighting the idea that the update of the show is a really central part to it. There’s no world war ahead of Holmes (please God @2020) so the wind of change must be referring to something else… I really couldn’t possibly comment as to why the change of time period might be so important!

This chapter has been a long one, but I hoped it help to set up EMP theory on firm foundations. We’ll move into TAB next – see you there!


	4. It is always 1895 [TAB 1/1]

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> As with the previous episode, I would recommend having recently seen TAB for this chapter!

TAB is my favourite episode of _Sherlock_. It is a masterpiece that investigates queerness, the canon and the psyche all within an hour and a half. Huge amounts of work has been done on this episode, however, so I’m not going to do a line by line breakdown – that could fill a small book. A great starting point for understanding the myriad of references in TAB is Rebekah’s three part video series on the episode, of which the first instalment can be found here [X](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6NLaGyvgIOA&list=PL-TcTV244YQvdJOeiMMBrfFu_sz3Ux_9w&index=12). I broadly agree with this analysis; what I’m going to do here, though, is place that analysis within the framework of EMP theory. As a result, as much as it pains me, this chapter won’t give a breakdown of carnation wallpaper or glass houses or any of those quietly woven references – we’re simply going in to how it plays into EMP theory.

Before digging into the episode, I want to take a brief diversion to talk about one of my favourite films, _Mulholland Drive_ (2001).

If you haven’t seen _Mulholland Drive_ , I really recommend it – it’s often cited as the best film of the last 20 years, and watching it really helps to see where TAB came from and the genre it’s operating in. David Lynch is one of the only directors to do the dream-exploration-of-the-psyche well, and I maintain that a lot of the fuckiness in the fourth series draws on Lynch. However, what I actually want to point out about _Mulholland Drive_ is the structure of it, because I think it will help us understand TAB a little better. [If you don’t want spoilers for _Mulholland Drive_ , skip the next paragraph.]

The similarities between these two are pretty straightforward; the most common reading of _Mulholland Drive_ is that an actress commits suicide by overdose after causing the death of her ex-girlfriend, who has left her for a man, and that the first two-thirds of the film are her dream of an alternate scenario in which her girlfriend is saved. The last third of the film zooms in and out of ‘real life’, but at the end we see a surreal version of the actual overdose which suggests that this ‘real life’, too, has just been in her psyche. Sherlock dying and recognising that this may kill John is an integral part of TAB, and the relationships have clear parallels, but what is most interesting here is the structural similarity; two-thirds of the way through TAB, give or take, we have the jolt into reality, zoom in and out of it for a while and then have a fucky scene to finish with that suggests that everything is, in fact, still in our dying protagonist’s brain. _Mulholland Drive_ ’s ending is a lot sadder than TAB’s – the fact that, unlike _Sherlock_ , there is no sequel can lead us to assume that Diane dies – and it’s also a **lot** more confusing; it’s often cited as one of the most complicated films ever made even just in terms of surface level plot, before getting into anything else, and it certainly took me a huge amount of time on Google before I could approach anything like a resolution on it!

 _Mulholland Drive_ is the defining film in terms of the navigating-the-surreal-psyche subgenre, and so the structural parallels between the two are significant – and definitely point to the idea that Sherlock hasn’t woken up at the end of TAB, which is important. But we don’t need to take this parallel as evidence; there’s plenty of that in the episode itself. Let’s jump in.

**Emelia as Eurus**

****

When we first meet Eurus in TST, she calls herself E; this initialism is a link to Moriarty, but it’s also a convenient link to other ‘E’ names. Lots of people have already commented on the aural echo of ‘Eros’ in ‘Eurus’, which is undeniable; the idea that there is something sexual hidden inside her name chimes beautifully with her representation of a sexual repression. The other important character to begin with E, however, is Emelia Ricoletti. The name ‘Emelia’ doesn’t come from ACD canon, and it’s an unorthodox spelling (Amelia would be far more common), suggesting that starting with an ‘E’ is a considered choice.

When TAB aired, we were preoccupied with Emelia as a Sherlock mirror, and it’s easy to see why; the visual parallels (curly black hair, pale skin) plus the parallel faked death down to the replacement body, which Mofftiss explicitly acknowledge in the episode. However, I don’t think that this reading is complete; rather, she foreshadows the Eurus that we meet in s4. The theme of ghosts links TAB with s4 very cleanly; TAB is about Emelia, but there is also a suggestion of the ghosts of one’s past with Sir Eustace as well as Sherlock’s own claims (‘the shadows that define our every sunny day’). Compare this to s4 – ‘ghosts from the past’ appears on pretty much every promotional blurb, and the word is used several times in relation to Eurus. If Eurus is the ghost from Sherlock’s past, the repressive part of his psyche that keeps popping back, Emelia is a lovely metaphor for this; she is quite literally the ghost version of Sherlock who won’t die.

What does it mean, then, when Jim and Emelia become one and the same in the scene where Jim wears the bride’s dress? We initially read this as Jim being the foil to Sherlock, his dark side, but I think it’s more complicated than this. Sherlock’s brain is using Emelia as a means of understanding Jim, but when we watch the episode it seems that they’ve actually merged. Jim wearing the veil of the bride is a good example of this, but I also invite you to rewatch the moment when John is spooked by the bride the night that Eustace dies; the _do not forget me_ song has an undeniable South Dublin accent.* This is quite possibly Yasmine Akram [Janine] rather than Andrew Scott, of course, but let’s not forget that these characters are resolutely similar, and hearing Jim’s accent in a genderless whisper is a pretty clear way of inflecting him into the image of the bride. In addition to this, Eustace then has ‘Miss Me?’ written on his corpse, cementing the link to Moriarty.

[*the South Dublin accent is my accent, so although we hear a half-whispered song for all of five seconds, I’m pretty certain about this]

Jim’s merging with Emelia calls to mind for me what I think might be the most important visual of all of series 4 – Eurus and Jim’s Christmas meeting, where they dance in circles with the glass between them and seem to merge into each other. I do talk about this in a later chapter, but TLDR – if Jim represents John being in danger and Eurus represents decades of repressed gay trauma, this merging is what draws the trauma to the surface just as Jim’s help is what suddenly makes Eurus a problem. It is John’s being in danger which makes Sherlock’s trauma suddenly spike and rise – he has to confront this for the first time – just like Emelia Ricoletti’s case from 1895 only needs solving for the first time now that Jim is back.

At some point I want to do a drag in Sherlock meta, because I think there’s a lot more to it than meets the eye, but Jim in a bride’s dress does draw one obvious drag parallel for me.

If you haven’t seen the music video for _I Want to Break Free_ , it’s 3 minutes long and glorious – and also, I think, reaps dividends when seen in terms of _Sherlock_. You can watch it here: [X](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f4Mc-NYPHaQ)

Not only is it a great video, but for British people of Mofftiss’s age, it’s culturally iconic and not something that would be forgotten when choosing that song for Jim. Queen were intending to lampoon _Coronation Street_ , a British soap, and already on the wrong side of America for Freddie Mercury’s unapologetic queerness, found themselves under fire from the American censors. Brian May says that no matter how many times he tried to explain _Coronation Street_ to the Americans, they just didn’t get it. This was huge controversy at the time, but the video and the controversy around it also managed to cement _I Want to Break Free_ as Queen’s most iconic queer number – despite not even being one of Mercury’s songs. There is no way that Steven Moffat, and even more so Mark Gatiss would not have an awareness of this in choosing this song for Moriarty. Applying any visual to this song is going to invite comparisons to the video – and inflecting a sense of drag here is far from inappropriate. Moriarty has been subsumed into Eurus in Sherlock’s brain – the male and the female are fused into an androgynous and implicitly therefore all-encompassing being. I’m not necessarily comfortable with the gendered aspect of this – genderbending is something we really only see in our villains here – but given this is about queer trauma, deliberately queering its form in this way is making what we’re seeing much more explicit.

**Nothing new under the sun**

_“The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no_ _new thing under the sun”_ (Ecclesiastes)

 _"Read it up -- you really should. There is nothing new under the sun. It has all been done before."_ (A Study in Scarlet, Sherlock Holmes)

 _“Hasn’t this all happened before? There’s nothing new under the sun._ _”_ (The Abominable Bride, Jim Moriarty)

This is arguably the key to spotting that TAB is a dream long before they tell us – when TAB’s case is early revealed to be a mixture between TRF (Emelia’s suicide) and TGG (the five pips), and we see the opening of ASiP repeated, we should be questioning what on earth is going on. This can also help us to recognise s4 as being EMP as well though – old motifs from the previous series keep repeating through the cases, like alarm bells ringing. Moriarty telling Sherlock that there is nothing new under the sun is his key to understanding that the Emelia case is meant to help him understand what happened to Jim, that it’s a mental allegory or **mirror** to help him parse it. This doesn’t go away when TAB ends! Moving into TST, one of the striking things is that cases are still repeating! _The Six Thatchers_ appeared on John’s blog way back, before the fall – you can read it here: [X](http://johnwatsonblog.co.uk/blog/19december). It’s about a gay love affair that ends in one participant killing the other. Take from that what you will, when John’s extramarital affection is making him suicidal and Sherlock comatose. Meanwhile, the title of _The Final Problem_ refers to the story that was already covered in TRF and the phone situation with the girl on the plane references both ASiB and TGG, and the ending of TST is close to a rerun of HLV. It’s pretty much impossible to escape echoes of previous series in a way that is almost creepy, but we’ve already had this explained to us in TAB – _none of this is real_. It’s supposed to be explaining what is happening in the real world – and Mofftiss realised that this was going to be difficult to stomach, and so they included TAB as a kind of key to the rest of the EMP, which becomes much more complex.

However, if we want to go deeper we should look at where that quote comes from. I’ve given a few epigraphs to this section to show where the quote comes from – first the book of Ecclesiastes, then _A Study in Scarlet_. It’s one of the first things Holmes says and it is during his first deduction in Lauriston Gardens. This is where I’m going to dive pretty deep into the metatextual side of things, so bear with the weirdness.

[we’re going deeper]

Holmes’s first deduction from _A Study in Scarlet_ shows that he’s no great innovator – he simply notices things and spots patterns from things he has seen before. This is highlighted by the fact that he even makes this claim by quoting someone before him. If our Sherlock also makes deductions based on patterns from the past, extensive dream sequences where he works through past cases as mirrors for present ones makes perfect sense and draws very cleverly on canon. However, I think his spotting of patterns goes deeper than that. Sherlock Holmes has been repressed since the publication of _A Study in Scarlet_ , through countless adaptations in literature and film. Plenty of these adaptations as well as the original stories are referenced in the EMP, not least by going back to 1895, the year that symbolises the era in which most of these adaptations are set. (If you don’t already know it, check out the poem [221B by Vincent Starrett](https://allpoetry.com/poem/8599039-221b-by-Vincent-Starrett), one of the myriad of reasons why the year 1895 is so significant.) My feeling is that these adaptations, which have layered on top of each other in the public consciousness to cement the image of Sherlock Holmes the deductive machine [which he’s not, sorry Conan Doyle estate] come to symbolise the 100+ years of repression that Sherlock himself has to fight through to come out of the EMP as his queer self.

This is one of the reasons that the year 1895 is so important; it was the year of Oscar Wilde’s trial and imprisonment for gross indecency, and this is clearly a preoccupation of Sherlock’s consciousness in TFP with its constant Wilde references, suggesting that his MP’s choice of 1895 wasn’t coincidental. Much was made during TAB setlock of a newspaper that said ‘Heimish The Ideal Husband’, Hamish being John’s middle name and _An Ideal Husband_ being one of Wilde’s plays. But the Vincent Starrett poem, although nostalgic and ostensibly lovely, for tjlcers and it seems for Sherlock himself symbolises something much more troubling. Do search up the full poem, but for now let’s look at the final couplet.

_Here, though the world explode, these two survive_

_And it is always 1895_

‘Though the world explode’ is a reference to WW1, which is coming in the final Sherlock Holmes story, and which is symbolised by Eurus – in other chapters, I explain why Eurus and WW1 are united under the concept of ‘winds of change’ in this show. Sherlock and John survive the winds of change – except they don’t move with them. Instead, they stay stuck in 1895, the year of ultimate repression. 2014!Sherlock going back in his head to 1895 and repeating how he met John suggests exactly that, that nothing has changed but the superficial, and that emotionally, he is still stuck in 1895.

Others have pulled out similar references to Holmes adaptations he has to push through in TAB – look at the way he talks in sign language to Wilder, which can only be a reference to Billy Wilder, director of TPLoSH, the only queer Holmes film, and a film which was forced to speak through coding because of the Conan Doyle estate. That film is also referenced by Eurus giving Sherlock a Stradivarius, which is a gift given to him in TPLoSH in exchange for feigning heterosexuality. Eurus is coded as Sherlock’s repression, and citing a repressive moment in a queer film as her first action when she meets Sherlock is another engagement by Sherlock’s psyche with his own cinematic history. My favourite metatextual moment of this nature, however, is the final scene of TFP which sees John and Sherlock running out of a building called Rathbone Place.

Basil Rathbone is one of the most iconic Sherlock Holmes actors on film, and Benedict’s costume in TAB and in particular the big overcoat look are very reminiscent of Rathbone.

Others have discussed ([X](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U-39R_oOR8g&list=PL-TcTV244YQvXdjTdUhLf9_EhhmdaCEiE&index=14)) how the Victorian costume and the continued use of the deerstalker in the present day are images of Sherlock’s public façade and exclusion of queerness from his identity. It’s true that pretty much every Holmes adaptation has used the deerstalker, but the strong Rathbone vibes that come from Ben’s TAB costume ties the 1895 vibe very strongly into Rathbone. To have the final scene – and hopefully exit from the EMP – tie in with Sherlock and John running _out_ of Rathbone Place tells us that, just as Sherlock cast off the deerstalker at the end of TAB (!), he has also cast off the iconic filmic Holmes persona which has never been true to his actual identity.

**Waterfall scene**

The symbol of water runs through TAB as well as s4 – others have written fantastic meta on why water represents Sherlock’s subconscious ([X](https://loudest-subtext-in-tv.tumblr.com/post/155883533189/emp-theory-from-hlv-to-tld)), but I want to give a brief outline. It first appears with the word ‘deeper’ which keeps reappearing, which then reaches a climax in the waterfall scene. The idea that Sherlock could drown in the waters of his mind is something that Moriarty explicitly references, suggesting that Sherlock could be ‘buried in his own Mind Palace’. The ‘deep waters’ line keeps repeating through series 4, and I just want to give the notorious promo photo from s4 which confirms the significance of the motif.

This is purely symbolic – it never happens in the show. Water increases in significance throughout – think of Sherlock thinking he’s going mad in his mind as he is suspended over the Thames, or the utterly nonsensical placement of Sherrinford in the middle of the ocean – the deepest waters of Sherlock’s mind. Much like the repetition of cases hinting that EMP continues, the use of water is something that appears in the MP, and it sticks around from TAB onwards, a real sign that we’re going deeper and deeper. I talk about this more in the bit on TFP, but the good news is that Sherrinford is the most remote place they could find in the ocean – that’s the deepest we’re going. After that, we’re coming out (of the mind).

Shortly after TAB aired, I wrote a meta about the waterfall scene, some of which I now disagree with, but the core framework still stands – it did not, of course, bank on EMP theory. You can find it here ([X](https://thewatsonbeekeepers.tumblr.com/post/136453171889/its-not-the-fall-its-the-landing-why-johnlock)), but I want to reiterate the basic framework, because it still makes a lot of sense. Jim represents the fear of John’s suicide, and Jim can only be defeated by Sherlock and John together, not one alone – and crucially, calling each other by first names, which would have been very intimate in the Victorian era. After Jim is “killed”, we have Sherlock’s fall. The concept of a fall (as in IOU a fall) has long been linked with falling in love in tjlc. Sherlock tells John that it’s not the fall that kills you, it’s the landing, something that Jim has been suggesting to him for a while. What is the landing, then? Well, Sherlock Holmes fell in love back in the Victorian era, symbolised by the ultra repressive 1895, and that’s where he jumps from – but he **lands** in the 21st century. Falling in love won’t kill him in the modern day. What I missed that time around, of course, was that despite breaking through the initial Victorian layers of repression, he still dives into more water, and when the plane lands, it still lands in his MP, just in a mental state where the punishment his psyche deals him for homosexuality is less severe. This also sets up s4 as specifically dealing with the problem of the fall – Sherlock jumps to the 21st century specifically to deal with the consequences of his romantic and sexual feelings. There’s a parallel here with Mofftiss time jumping; back when they made A Study in Twink in 2009, there was a reason they made the time jump. Having Sherlock’s psyche have that touch of self-awareness helps to illustrate why they made a similar jump, also dealing with the weight of previous adaptations.

**Women**

I preface this by saying how incredibly uncomfortable I find the positioning of women as the KKK in TAB. It’s a parallel which is unforgivable; frankly, invoking the KKK without interrogating the whiteness of the show or even mentioning race is unacceptable. Steven Moffat’s ability to write women has consistently been proven to be nil, but this is a new low. However, the presence of women in TAB is vital, so on we go.

TAB specifically deals with the question of those excluded from a Victorian narrative. This is specifically tied into to those who are excluded from the stories, such as Jane and Mrs. Hudson. Mrs. Hudson’s complaint is in the same scene as John telling her and Sherlock to blame the problems on the illustrator. This ties back to the deerstalker metaphor which is so prevalent in this episode; something that’s not in the stories at all, but a façade by which Holmes is universally recognised and which as previously referenced masks his queerness. Women, then, are not the only people being excluded from the narrative. When Mycroft tells us that the women have to win, he’s also talking about queer people. This is a war that we must lose.

I don’t think the importance of Molly in particular here has been mentioned before, but forgive me if I’m retreading old ground. However, Molly always has importance in _Sherlock_ as a John mirror, and just because she is dressed as a man here doesn’t mean we should disregard this. If anything, her ridiculous moustache is as silly as John’s here! Molly, although really a member of the resistance, is able to pass in the world she moves in in 1895, but only by masking her own identity. This is exactly what happens to John in the Victorian era – as a bisexual man married to a woman, he is able to pass, but it is not his true identity. More than that, Molly is a member of the resistance, suggesting not just that John is queer but that he’s aware of it and actively looking for it to change.

I know I was joking about Molly and John’s moustaches, but putting such a silly moustache on Molly links to the silliness of John’s moustaches, which only appear when he’s engaged to a woman and in the Victorian era. He has also grown the moustache just so the illustrator will recognise him, and Molly has grown her moustache so that she will be recognised as a man. In this case, Molly is here to demonstrate the fact that John is passing, but only ever passing. Furthermore, Molly, who is normally the kindest person in the whole show, is bitter and angry throughout TAB – it’s not difficult to see then how hiding one’s identity can affect one’s mental health. I really do think that John is a lot more abrasive in TAB than he is in the rest of the show, but that’s not the whole story. Showing how repression can completely impair one’s personality also points to the suicidal impulses that are lurking just out of sight throughout TAB – this is what Sherlock is terrified of, and again his brain is warning him just what it is that is causing John this much pain and uncharacteristic distress.

This is just about the loosest sketch of TAB that could exist! But TAB meta has been so extensive that going over it seems futile, or else too grand a project within a short chapter. Certain theories are still formulating, and may appear at a later date! But what this chapter (I hope) has achieved has set up the patterns that we’re going to see play out in s4 – between the metatextuality, the waters of the mind and the role of Moriarty in the psyche, we can use TAB as a key with which to read s4. I like to think of it as a gift from Mofftiss, knowing just how cryptic s4 would be – and these are the basic clues with which to solve it.

That’s it for TAB, at least in this series – next up we’re going ever deeper, to find out exactly who is Eurus. See you then?


	5. Hey Soul Sister: Who is Eurus?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The chapter that deals with who or what Eurus might represent in Sherlock's Mind Palace.

**Chapter 5 – Hey, Soul Sister: Who is Eurus?**

Do you get it? She’s his sister? But metaphorically, she’s a part of his soul? I was very impressed with myself for [this title](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kVpv8-5XWOI). Anyway…

This chapter of the meta is going to deal with the various times we meet Eurus _before_ TFP and what this might mean, which will help us to understand who she is once we have stripped off the disguises.

Before series 4, we had real!characters and MP!characters set up as distinct entities, particularly in TSoT, which distinguishes between MP!Mycroft (the deducing brain) and real!Mycroft, as well as MP!Irene representing desire and real!Irene, who doesn’t come near the episode. The MP section in TSoT, for a lot of people in the fandom, broke down Sherlock’s psyche into MP!John vs. MP!Mycroft – and John is clearly winning.

However, I want to suggest that Sherlock’s psyche isn’t nearly so straightforward as a tug of war between the brain and the heart. Whilst MP!Mycroft undoubtedly represents the oppressively reasonable part of Sherlock’s psyche, that’s not the only thing repressing him – it can’t be. If it were simply a rejection of ‘sentiment’, this wouldn’t be the powerful queer love story we know it to be – there is a lot more internalised homophobia being dealt with than just love being illogical. **That’s** where Eurus comes in.

Eurus and Mycroft are parallel oppressive forces in Sherlock’s brain, but they’re oppressive in different ways. Having family members and childhood trauma be the psyche’s symbols for repression is particularly poignant in a queer love story, for obvious reasons. However, I want to take you through my reasoning behind Eurus being the most secret and troubled part of Sherlock’s soul.

The first clue is that her prison is called Sherrinford. We all assumed that the third Holmes sibling was going to be Sherrinford back before s4, and it seemed that way in the beginning, with Mycroft mentioning speaking to Sherrinford several times, construing it as a person rather than a place. This is no coincidence – for those who aren’t familiar with the history of the stories, Conan Doyle’s original name for his protagonist was Sherrinford Holmes, which he later changed to Sherlock. That Eurus is trapped inside Sherrinford is a clear suggestion that Eurus is something that’s trapped inside Sherlock – a dangerous MP entity. More important than that, Sherrinford is the version of Holmes _that never made it into the books_. Plenty of people have worked on queering the Holmes canon and working out what ACD might have been implying and leaving out and arguably none more so in an adaptation that Mofftiss. Let’s think about the implications of this. A kind of second self, not shown to the public, buried inside your mind and forgotten since childhood, which is bursting out into a moment of acute psychological distress. Gee, I don’t know what that could be about. The Sherlock that Sherlock thinks he is has thus far been dominated by MP!Mycroft, but this series is about uniting canon!Holmes with the non-canon, queer Sherrinford who has **always existed** , judging by the name, and who is currently dominated by the destructive MP!Eurus. The other important point to note here is that Sherrinford is an island in the middle of the sea – that’s not a coincidence, given how much water imagery abounds in this series. I spoke briefly in Chapter 2 [X](https://thewatsonbeekeepers.tumblr.com/post/630215578289864704/chapter-2-look-up-here-im-in-heaven-the) about how water represents Sherlock sinking deeper and deeper into his own subconsciousness – this is the deepest he can go. In Greek mythology, Eurus was the name of the wind most associated with causing storms at sea [X](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anemoi#Eurus) – this isn’t a coincidence either. She’s very deliberately tied in with water.

(In real life terms, of course, all this means that a real!Eurus probably does or did exist in some form, although I can’t begin to hazard a guess about this. However, I’m trying to refer to her as MP!Eurus when she’s in her normal form in the MP, in case we get a series 5 with Sian Brooke as real!Eurus, and also to distinguish her from therapist!Eurus etc.)

This is my reasoning as to why MP!Eurus represents Sherlock’s innermost trauma. She is not merely the fact that he loves John – he deduced this in TSoT without her appearance. She is the trauma that he needs to come to terms with. A running theme through our analysis of Eurus will be that her gender is particularly important; her representation of Sherlock’s repression cannot be but as a woman, because for most of s4 he is only able to process his identity through the most heterosexual of lenses. We see this hinted at quite early on in TST, when Sherlock takes on a case called ‘The Duplicate Man’, warning John that it is never twins. The word ‘duplicate’ here, removing twins, leaves us with the only real possibility that it is in fact the same person. Eurus’s gender makes that more difficult to see; she needs to be female, but it’s much more difficult to elide the two characters without employing a Cumberbatch doppelganger. However, this hint that Eurus is not only male but an actual ‘duplicate’ of her brother should give us pause for thought. With this in mind, I want to use the rest of this chapter to analyse her three forms before TFP.

  * _Faith!Eurus_



I’m certainly not the first to point out that Faith!Eurus is a mirror for John, nor will I be the last – people jumped on it pretty much as soon as TLD aired. There are a few good reasons for this. Firstly, she walks with a cane, a throwback to ASiP – in case we’d forgotten, however, Sherlock has a flashback to John walking with a cane to make the link explicit. We are supposed to link these two characters, the authors are saying pretty clearly. Faith!Eurus is also suicidal, which John was at the start of ASiP, as made clear by the fact he carried a gun – and Faith!Eurus does the same. Sherlock also takes her out for food (for more on the food/sex metaphor, see here [X](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Kkvj_sDHiQ&list=PL-TcTV244YQvXdjTdUhLf9_EhhmdaCEiE&index=5)) which he doesn’t with anyone bar John, and we certainly never see him talk so easily with someone who isn’t John. An eagle-eyed tumblr post that I can’t find now also broke my heart in pointing out that Faith!Eurus’s unseen self-harm matches long-sleeved John Watson a little too well.

This isn’t just the show trying to remind us of what John was like in ASiP, however. MP!Eurus is the trauma prodding Sherlock’s sexuality – it’s going to be hell to get through it, but he absolutely needs to do it. This is Sherlock’s trauma, not reminding him that John was suicidal, but forcing him to acknowledge it in the first place, something which Sherlock has buried. We know this because of the way the image of John forces its way into Sherlock’s mind – it’s much like the way Moriarty breaks into TAB. His brain is making a connection that he’s not quite capable of making and it’s knocking him. His deduction that Faith!Eurus is suicidal is accompanied by that image of John, and he then re-enacts the food ritual he completed with John the evening John left his cane behind, before throwing Faith!Eurus’s gun into the Thames – proving that it was Sherlock himself who stopped John from taking his own life.

This is trauma, however, and Sherlock can’t process it in full – hence why the image of John that breaks in is shaky, and Sherlock tries to push it out of his head. It’s also why Faith!Eurus, who in Sherlock’s subconscious could take any form, specifically takes the form of a woman. His gay trauma means that he first has to process John’s suicidal ideation in a heterosexual dynamic, before fully grasping and applying it to his relationship with John. (Chapter 9 X explains how that plays out over the rest of TLD in full detail.)

  * _E!Eurus_



Taking a jump back to surface level plot here, the first thing that grabbed me about E!Eurus was just how minor John’s flirtation with her was. In the terms of a television show which really rides on very high drama (multiple faked deaths and insane cliffhangers for a start), the emotional peak of John’s emotional arc with Mary being that he texted another woman – not went out for lunch, not kissed, not slept with – is bizarre, particularly when we know next to nothing about E!Eurus at this point. It’s incredibly anti-climactic as a means of John falling short of Mary’s view of him. Maybe we can accept it as in line with John Moral-Principles Watson, but it’s difficult to accept as in keeping with the nature of a show whose intent is nearly always to shock.

With this in mind, let’s delve back into the MP to see how that might give this moment greater emotional significance. Chapter 10 X is on the hug scene, and that will deal with John’s revelation of his infidelity in greater detail. For the moment, the most important thing to remember is that John Watson is not real!John – he is heart!John. In other words, we are seeing a similarly heterosexualised re-enactment of Sherlock’s relationship with John.

I will talk a lot in Chapter 10 X about how MP!Mary is linked to Sherlock’s compulsory heterosexuality; at the end of TST, Sherlock substitutes Mary’s body for his because he cannot conceive of John’s queer grief without breaking himself. This is interesting because the E of Eurus actually stands for Elizabeth in this scene (certainly in the credits, and possibly elsewhere, although I can’t remember Sian Brooke actually saying it). Elizabeth is Mary’s middle name in BBC Sherlock, which looks like another of those shared name links our creators love so well. If so, this begins to justify how Sherlock’s heart is conceiving of its emotions. We will see in TLD that heart!John’s relationship with fem!John in the form of Eurus is aligned with Sherlock’s sexual desire in the form of MP!Irene. Both are hidden and exist only in texts – i.e., they cannot be spoken yet. But they will be.

  * _Therapist!Eurus_



This one is perhaps the most straightforward on a symbolism level, but also possibly the most significant moment in the series. Therapist!Eurus, plain and simple, is Sherlock’s trauma prodding at John, interrogating him like a therapist would, trying to work him out – and largely failing, right? She can get basically nothing about how he feels about Sherlock out of him. But this is part of MP!Eurus’s ongoing project to get Sherlock to wake up – the Gay Trauma is interrogating John, trying to suss him, and failing.

Except, in the final scene of TLD, without the help of Therapist!Eurus, Sherlock has finally sussed John – it has taken until Culverton’s confession to recognise that John is suicidal without Sherlock (Chapter 9 X). The sigh of relief that is the hug scene (Chapter 10 X) is a kind of acknowledgement of that relief that he’s finally worked out what he’s been trying to cover up with drugs – so much so, that he misses the obvious, which is that John is suicidal again. When John leaves his cane with Sherlock in the hospital, it is a reminder of the first time he is suicidal, and Sherlock doesn’t make the immediate leap in his comatose haze that this is what his psyche has been trying to tell him. Hence you have this moment of immense relief and fade out at the end of the hug scene which suggests the end of the episode, and could feasibly end Sherlock’s life, except we’re started awake with a much more abrupt and troubling ending scene – Therapist!Eurus shooting John. Because, of course, if Sherlock is gone again, John must be suicidal again, and it has taken a few scenes of cognitive dissonance for this to clock. Indeed, it’s not Sherlock himself who clocks – Gay Trauma in the form of Eurus!Therapist returns and shoots John for us. This shooting isn’t, of course, permanent (in one of the worst cliffhanger resolutions in TV history), but that’s because it’s not real – it hasn’t happened yet. It is Sherlock, through MP!Eurus, finally recognising the problem – John.

This is particularly poignant in light of the opening and closing shots of TLD. Although there’s the fucky not-blood red that fills the screen at the end of TLD, apart from that the shots of Norbury shooting Mary and Therapist!Eurus shooting John are **one and the same shot**. It’s also a stylish shot (what I call split screen, but given that I never went to film school I think that’s just my name for it) and it’s repeated enough times over TLD that it’s pretty clear the creatives want it to be memorable. By the time John gets shot, then, we shouldn’t be caught up in the drama of it – we should be thinking, as so many did, “something’s fucky.”

And it is – but it’s brilliantly fucky! Head over to Chapter 7 X if you want to read about Norbury shooting Mary, but TLDR it’s a metaphor for Mary shooting Sherlock as understood from Sherlock’s ~~warped and depressed~~ perspective – and he’s finally realised what it means! The version in which Mary shooting Sherlock means John losing Mary (the Norbury version) is one in which John is sad, goes to therapy, and the world moves on. Now, however, that Sherlock has recognised that John was suicidal, he can also recognise that Mary shooting Sherlock will make John suicidal again – hence why it’s the same shot. _Mary shooting Sherlock is the same as John dying – and the latter is much more important in Sherlock’s mind._

[It’s worth noting that the identical shots we see in TST and TLD **don’t** match the shot in HLV, although admittedly that one’s not in the MP – it does strike me, however, that the sounds are reversed – HLV sounds like a dart, whereas the MP shots sound like bullets. If anyone has any thoughts on that, do let me know – it has me flummoxed for the moment. If you want meta explaining why the shot from TST is the same as HLV, Chapter 7 is here X, and I’m certainly not the first to hypothesise this. For me, the TLD shot being the same is therefore a logical extension.]


	6. So Long and Thanks for all the Fish (TST 1/1)

The chapter title comes from the wonderful _Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy_ book series – drop this meta and read them immediately.

 _No, no he_ [Moriarty] _would never be that disappointing. He’s planned something, something long-term. Something that would take effect if he never made it off that rooftop alive. Posthumous revenge – no, better than that. Posthumous game._

This is what Sherlock says about Moriarty in the very first scene of TST, and on rewatch the application to Mofftiss is startling. Trust the writers – a short-term disappointment for a long-term excitement, if you will. The reference to the rooftop is a way of pointing out just how far back this has been planned – in other words, the seeming randomness of the series is not in fact random. But let’s see how that plays out in TST.

This episode opens, as so many have pointed out, with doctored footage, as though deliberately showing us how stories can be rewritten. However, we only get glimpses of the footage at the start of the episode – the extensive old footage is not security camera footage, but recap footage from s3, and specifically the end of HLV. The idea that there is something classified, hidden, that we don’t have the full story, is meant to be associated with the actual show _Sherlock_ , not just the camera footage – it would have been very easy to give us most of the same footage in security camera style, but they deliberately reused shots from the show to make us doubt their own authenticity. So far, so good.

The first thing that I (and most of my friends) noticed about this scene, however, is that it’s not good. The writing is questionable, to say the least. The serious resolution to the problem of Magnussen’s murder is interrupted by Sherlock tweeting, brotherly bickering, hyperactive and possibly high Sherlock being played for comedy (complete with mock opera). And then, perhaps the worst lines of the show so far:

SHERLOCK: I always know when the game is on. Do you know why?

SMALLWOOD: Why?

SHERLOCK: Because I love it.

Like a lot of this show, think about those lines for more than a nanosecond and they really don’t make sense. You’ve got to think about them for a lot longer before they start to again. This, I think, is where BBC Sherlock’s self-parody really starts. TAB focuses on parodying, critiquing and rewriting historical adaptations, but it’s easy to see the merging of all of the undeniably _Sherlock_ elements into one parodically awful scene. The quick quips that are supposed to be clever and that are so common in Moffat’s dialogue are seen in that moment of dialogue – but the quip isn’t clever anymore, it’s empty. The same catchphrase of ‘the game is on’ comes back, and the quintessential use of technology is referenced in Sherlock’s Twitter account, where again his #OhWhatABeautifulMorning is unfathomably glib. Our Sherlock is also better known than previous adaptations for his drug abuse, and this also gets referenced, but here it gets played for comedy, which is incongruous with the rest of the show – in fact, THoB, HLV and TAB all take it pretty seriously, so to see it played off as a joke is tonally questionable. In other words, here we have _Sherlock_ caricatured as a programme, in one scene – and it’s horrible.

(We should also notice that the use of Twitter is important – it underlies a lot of the glib comedy in this episode, with Sherlock later Tweeting #221BringIt (which is so unbelievably queer?). In _Sherlock_ , Moffat use Twitter rather than Tumblr to comment on fan reaction to _Sherlock_ , probably because their older audience will have no idea what Tumblr is, but also because Twitter is much more mainstream in its appreciation. Twitter takes centre stage in TEH, with #SherlockLives and the scene with the support group. The joke there is about the sheer level of how-did-he-do-it mania that gripped the public – so when we see Twitter again, we should be thinking about an extratextual as well as a textual response to Sherlock, and how Sherlock’s behaviour on Twitter in this episode might caricature the way that he is seen from the outside.)

I don’t truly buy that (in this scene, at least) Mofftiss are critiquing their own show in a straightforward sense, because they have dealt with technology better than this (words on screen, technology as useful within mysteries), drugs better than this (John’s, Mycroft’s and Molly’s reactions to Sherlock’s behaviour as well as Sherlock’s own difficulties) and clever quips far better (pick any episode). But in deconstructing this show to its instantly recognisable elements, and making them worse to hyperbolise the point, that scene strips the show of its heart. Interestingly, it’s also stripped of John, who will be the metaphorical heart of Sherlock through the EMP, but is also the part of the show that is missing when it is caricatured as the Benedict-Cumberbatch-being-clever show. This is also a critique of most people’s perception of Sherlock Holmes as a character through history in the sense of the reductive cleverness – Mofftiss are showing us that this is completely empty.

What does this mean for Sherlock himself, bearing in mind that this is taking place in his Mind Palace? The answer is pretty grim – remember that Sherlock is metatextually grappling with his own identity at this point; he needs to discover the man he is, rather than is portrayed as, in order to get out of this alive. In a psychological sense, then, the opening of TST sees Sherlock deconstruct himself as seen from the outside, and as his psyche has traditionally perceived himself, and realise that that version of himself is hollow. This scene, then, is a rejection of the Sherlock of the public eye, as well as Sherlock’s own eyes.

There is a non-explanation for how the Secret Service doctored the footage of Sherlock shooting Magnussen, the response simply being that they have the tech. If the answer is going to be that vague, there is little reason to bring up the question – except to raise it in the viewers’ minds. Making the audience question their belief in the s4 universe is something that happens very frequently, and this is the start of it. A later chapter goes into the parallels that _Sherlock_ and _Doctor Who_ have, but there’s an important bit from _Last Christmas_ (DW Christmas Special 2014) that is relevant here – the main characters, all dreaming, whenever they are asked any questions that can’t be explained in the dream universe, simply reply ‘it’s a long story’. This is a ‘long story’ moment – where no explanation is given, so questions about reality are raised and unanswered.

Another similar moment comes when Sherlock says he knows exactly what Moriarty is going to do next – how? And, more to the point, it becomes hugely obvious that he doesn’t. Yet, for the first time in history, he feels happy to sit back and wait on Moriarty, because he knows that what will come will come. This insistence that the future will take its course as it needs to might draw our minds ahead to the frankly ridiculous reliance on predictions that we see in TLD – however, it should also draw our minds across to _Doctor Who_ , and to _Amy’s Choice_ , a series five episode I’m going to delve deeper into later, but where because it’s a dream, the Doctor is able to predict every word the monsters say.

Notice that ‘glad to be alive’ is followed by Vivian saying her name – we’ll come back to this later.

Cue opening credits!

Before going anywhere else with TST, required reading is this meta by LSiT ([X](https://loudest-subtext-in-tv.tumblr.com/post/155883533189/emp-theory-from-hlv-to-tld)). I can’t make these points better than she has, nor can I take credit for them. I’m particularly invested in her description of the aquarium and the Samarra story, as well as the client cases that appear and aren’t updated on John’s blog. Our reading will diverge later on – I think this series is a lot more metaphorical than it is hypothesis-testing, although the latter is a notable feature of ACD canon (see the original THotB) that definitely does happen here as well. I’m going to leave the Samarra story, the aquarium and the cases for LSiT to explain, however, and move on.

When we move into 221B, the fuckiness is instantly apparent from the mirror. You can go here ([X](https://www.google.ie/maps/@51.5262789,-0.1369124,2a,75y,328.2h,93.48t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sGywsLonkAqwAAAQvxR4AeQ!2e0!7i13312!8i6656)) to navigate the whole inside of 221B, and I suggest you do; it’s a fantastic resource. The mirror showing the green wall is simply wrong – the angle that this is shot from suggests that we should see the black and white wallpaper, complete with skull etc. Instead, we see the green wall – and the door. We can tell this is wrong because in the ‘wrong thumb’ case about thirty seconds later, the right wallpaper is reflected in the mirror. Another note of fuckiness that we should spot is that Sherlock seems to be taking his cases from letters, in the mail he has knifed into the mantelpiece – this show has been really keen on emphasising that he uses email for the last three series, so the implication that people are sending him letters is even odder than it would be in a modern show anyway.

(Everybody in the world has commented on the ‘it’s never twins’ line – but to reiterate its importance. Firstly, it’s almost identical to the line in TAB, just with ‘it’s’ instead of ‘it is’. TAB repeats lots of things though, because it’s a dream – well yes, but dreams can’t tell the future. So material from TAB being recycled doesn’t point to TAB being a dream, it points to TST being a continuation of the dream in TAB. The fact that they saw fit to reiterate this line in a series about secret siblings also puts paid to the theory that s4 was plotted in a rush and not in line with previous series – there is a theme here, and they’re pushing it.)

And so we move to Sherlock relentlessly texting through the birth, through the christening – horrible, ooc behaviour for him if we think back to how emotional he was at the wedding. Importantly, this behaviour is all tied up with his obsessive Tweeting, which in turn links in to how the outside world (i.e. us) perceive Sherlock – is this the Sherlock that people want to see on screen? Doesn’t he feel wrong? Sure, there’s an element of self-critique in there from Mofftiss, but the incorporation of the phone obsession leaves the blame squarely with the audience. In case we couldn’t already feel that Sherlock’s character is way off, we have his Siri loudly say that she can’t understand him.

We remember from TAB that Sherlock sees himself as cleverer through John’s eyes, and the reasonably sympathetic portrayal we get in TAB we can probably put down to this attempt at understanding himself from the outside. The water in TST is showing us that we’re going in, and the sad thing is that this is almost definitely how Sherlock has come to perceive himself, but just like Siri he doesn’t truly recognise it. It’s also worth noting here the emphasis placed on God in godfather and later the deliberate mentions of Christianity at the Christening – there is also a tuning out of a culture he can’t really align himself with here, which is more important when we think about the fact that this character has been around since the 19th century.

Water tells us we’re sinking deep into Sherlock’s mind, as discussed in a previous chapter. Water imagery is going to be hugely prevalent in TST, but I want to talk quickly about the subtle hints at water even when we’re not in a giant fuck-off aquarium. Take a look at the rattle scene (which always sparks joy). When we get a side angle that shows both Sherlock and Rosie, there’s a black chest of some description behind Rosie – the top is glowing slightly blue, for reasons I can’t fathom. Then we’re going to cut to a shot of Rosie – despite seeing only a second before that there is nothing on her head, there is a glow of blue on it that looks almost like a skullcap. Cut back to Sherlock getting a rattle in the face, and the mirror is glowing the same blue colour behind him. This is all fucky, and it’s a fuckiness which is aesthetically tied to the waters of Sherlock’s mind perfectly. It suggests that Rosie isn’t real, but more important is the mirror. Earlier on I pointed out how the mirror was showing the wrong reflection; here, the mirror is glowing blue, linking it thematically to Sherlock’s subconsciousness. Visually, we’re being hinted at the process of self-reflection that’s going on in Sherlock’s brain – and the opening of TST is showing him getting it terribly wrong. Note that when the mirror jolted right earlier, Sherlock was proclaiming that it had been the wrong thumb – god knows what thumbs have to do with this, but there’s a question of shifting perception on his person, like he’s trying to locate himself.

The glowing blue light sticks around, and seems particularly associated with Rosie, like she’s the focus of much of Sherlock’s thought at the moment. LSiT’s meta linked above has already picked up on the many dangers in Rosie’s cradle decoration, from the Moriarty linked images to the killer whale mobile. Due purely to a lucky pause, I caught the killer whale’s eyes glowing blue, just like the blue from the rattle scene. He’s thinking about her in terms of the key villains of the show as well as the villains in his mind.

I’m not going to comment on the bus scene because I have a chapter dedicated to Eurus moments before TFP – jumping straight ahead.

We then find our first Thatcher case – others have been pretty quick to point out the significance of the blue power ranger in gay tv history ([X](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Yost)), and infer that Charlie is queer coded – much like David Yost, who played the blue power ranger, he is not able to come out without being treated badly. This is undoubtedly important, as is the fact that this is the second time in 12 minutes of this show that they’ve shown us how easily film footage can be faked, and someone can be lied to – you don’t need to have Mycroft Holmes levels of clearance, just a Zoom background. This is important too. But the other thing I want to focus on is that he says he’s in Tibet.

Sherlock comes pretty high on my list of top TV shows, but currently _Twin Peaks_ holds the top spot – it’s an unashamedly cryptic show all about solving mysteries through dreams, so no wonder I like it. It’s made by David Lynch, and in the TAB chapter I talk about how TAB takes a lot of structural inspiration from his most famous film, _Mulholland Drive_ , which has similar themes. I don’t think this is anything particularly interesting beyond an attempt to reference the defining work in the field of it-was-all-a-dream film and tv – David Lynch and Mofftiss and Victor Fleming are the only people I can think of who can actually make that plot look good. But this Tibet moment, particularly as we’re going to be hit by another reference to Tibet later, underlining its importance, I think is a reference to this scene ([X](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emEu2-_jjfk)) where the protagonist, Cooper, outlines a dream in which the Dalai Lama spoke to him and gave him the power to use magic to solve mysteries. Fans of _Twin Peaks_ will know that the magic doesn’t last long – it’s pretty much an introductory way in, and most of the rest of his important deductions will all be made in dreams. This is one of the most famous scenes in the whole programme, because it introduced the world to the weirdness of what had been set up as a straightforward cop show, and despite Cooper rarely (possibly never?) mentioning Tibet again, it’s still highly quoted and recognisable. As a watershed moment in bringing dream worlds into normal detective dramas (something highly frowned upon according to any theory of storytelling!) this is a gamechanging moment, and I don’t think it’s a stretch to point to _Sherlock_ ’s several references to Tibet as a link back to this moment.

We then cut back to Sherlock thinking whilst Lestrade tells him more about the case – what is bizarre here, is that John and Lestrade are clearly visible through what can only be described as a rearview mirror attached to the side of Sherlock’s head. If _anyone_ can tell me what that is, I would love to know. I’m going to assume it’s a fucky mirror, because it’s in keeping with the other fucky mirrors so far. The visibility of John and Lestrade in the mirror is even more odd because it doesn’t match the colour palette of 221B at all. Sherlock is lit largely in warm, brown colours, as is Charlie’s father in the previous scene we’re transitioning from – Lestrade and John are lit in dark blue, to the point where they’re barely visible. This looks like a rearview mirror, but not like the one on the power ranger car – it’s a much older car, out of a different time, like so much in this dream world. The only colour palette they seem to match is the one from the s4 promotion photos – you know, when Baker Street is completely underwater.

Drowning in the Mind Palace. Here we are, back where we started. Sherlock might be thinking about the case of Charlie, but he’s actually reflecting on that world we saw in the promo photos, where he’s struggling to stay alive in his brain. Notice that this isn’t just a split shot, it’s specifically a mirror, so we’re meant to focus on this episode as an act of reflection. There are great parallels between Sherlock and the Charlie case which you can find here ([X](https://ebaeschnbliah.tumblr.com/post/160948220594/two-times-charles)) – essentially, Charlie and Carl Powers from TGG are mirrors for one another both in their names and in the manner they die (a fit in a tight place, basically). Carl Powers is already a mirror for Sherlock – obsessively targeted by Jim for being the best at what he does. Charlie mirrors Sherlock through their shared trip to Tibet (dreamscape alert) and, we think, through the metatextual link of the blue power ranger. In case you hadn’t spotted it, Powers links back to that too – probably coincidence, but a nice one nevertheless. Carl Powers’s death is by drowning, which we shouldn’t ignore in an episode as loaded with ideas about drowning in the mind palace. The fact that the mirror reflects drowning Baker Street aesthetics should make us think that Charlie is asking us to reflect on Carl Powers’s death, but also on Sherlock’s own – already fatally injured (by a fit or by Mary), he is going to die smothered, unable to cry for help (in a swimming pool/carseat costume (?!)/mind palace). The idea that none of these people could cry for help is particularly poignant because so much of series 4 is about Sherlock being unable to voice his own identity, and as we’ll see once he’s able to do that, that may give him the impetus to escape his death. Think of ‘John Watson is definitely in danger’ back in HLV.

Now. Why is Sherlock so keen for Lestrade to take the credit? It’s another reason to bring up the fact that John’s blog is constantly updating – it’s dropped in a lot in this series as opposed to others – and to make us think about why nothing is happening in real life. But, given that this episode is about Sherlock trying to find who he is, is it a rejection of the persona that goes along with being Sherlock Holmes? Possibly, but he’s going to have to go to a lot more effort than that. John’s blog is the real problem here, making not just Sherlock but Lestrade out to be like they’re not. John’s blog is a stand in for the original stories, which were supposed to be written by John Watson, but TAB has already (drawing on TPLoSH) laid the groundwork for the idea that John’s blog/those stories really do not tell the whole story. So this is coming back with a vengeance here, even though for the first time Sherlock is properly moving against the persona in there, not just bitching about John’s writing style, which is a theme more common to Sherlock Holmes across the ages. John then says that it’s obvious, and when pressed just laughs and says that it’s normally what Sherlock says at this point – so again, when Sherlock stops filling the intense caricature of arrogance and bravado, John the storyteller steps in to put him back in line, even though that means pulling him back to being a much more unpleasant character.

A note here: most of the time in EMP theory, I think John represents Sherlock’s heart, and I try to refer to John as heart!John as much as possible when that’s the case. There are a few cases which are different, but most notable are when the blog comes up – then John becomes John the blogger, and our symbolism shifts over to the repressive features of the original stories and how that’s playing out in the modern world. Although a pain to analyse sometimes, I find it incredibly neat that the two of them are bound up in John as source of both love and pain, which fits our story beautifully.

John as blogger continues in the baby joke that he and Lestrade have going down the stairs – they continue with their caricature of Sherlock, but he doesn’t recognise himself in it. Or rather, there’s a moment when he seems to, but he can’t quite grasp onto it. This is typical of the way he recognises himself in the programme. It’s also worth noting that the image of John as a father is particularly tied into ACD, as the creator of Sherlock Holmes, so tying together blogger and father in this scene cements our theme.

Going into the Welsborough house, we get a slip of the tongue from Sherlock which is **fantastic**. He tells them that he is really sorry about their daughter, which at an earlier point in the show might just be a classic Sherlock slip-up. But mixing up genders is actually something which happens quite a lot in this show, and it’s something drawn attention to as significant in TAB.

Sherlock asks John “How did he survive?” of Emelia Ricoletti, when of course he’s thinking about Moriarty, and John corrects him quickly, much like here. A coincidental callback? Maybe not. What’s the first mistake that Sherlock ever makes? Thinking that Harry Watson is a man. What’s the big trick they pull at the end of S4? Sherlock has a secret _sister_ – and Eurus points out that her gender is the surprise at the end of TLD. Eurus is also an opposite-sex mirror for John and for Sherlock at various points and this allows Sherlock to approach their relations from a heterosexual standpoint and thus interrogate them – more on that later. So gender-swapping is a theme that runs through the show a lot. But the similarity to TAB in particular is important here, because in TAB that was our first obvious declaration that this wasn’t just a mirror to be analysed by the tumblr crowd, this was a mirror on the superficial level that had to be broken through. This callback to TAB is a callback to the mirrored dreamscape. Don’t believe me? Look at what happens next. The second Sherlock sees Thatcher the whole room not only goes underwater, but actually starts to shake – another throwback to recognising that Emelia was Moriarty, when the whole room shakes and the elephant in the room smashes. So, again, we’re being told that this isn’t about this case – it’s about something else, and that something is the elephant in the room. Just like the shaking smashes the elephant in the room, the shaking is what tells us about the smashed bust of Margaret Thatcher. Margaret Thatcher, whose laws on “promoting homosexuality” were infamous. Smashing the elephant in the room and Thatcher simultaneously between 2015, the 1980s and 1895 is hitting the history of British homophobia for the last hundred years summed up as quickly as possible, and tearing it down through Sherlock’s self-exploration. This is a good fucking show.

You’ll also notice that Sherlock is alone in the room, just for a second, when he has his Thatcher revelation – everybody else vanishes. Again, we’re seeing that the rest of the case is an illusion, providing just enough storytime to keep the audience believing in the dream, and possibly Sherlock too.

[There’s a fantastic framing of Sherlock here between two portraits, a man and a woman, seemingly ancestral – I would love to know more about these, because if I know Arwel they’re significant, and the way they hang over Sherlock is really metaphorically suggestive. If anyone has any info on that, it looks like a really good avenue to explore.]

Blue. Blue is the colour of Sherlock’s mind palace, but this scene ties it firmly to the Conservative party. The dark blue of Sherlock’s scarf nearly matches Welsborough’s jumper, which is in fact a better match for the mind palace aesthetic generally. Thatcher unsurprisingly wears blue as well. If blue is the water that Sherlock is drowning in, how interesting that it’s being tied to the most homophobic prime minister of the last 50 years. There was absolutely no need to make this guy a cabinet minister, dress him in blue, even make Thatcher replace Napoleon – I would actually argue that Churchill is a figure who matches Napoleon’s distance and stature much better for our time. Thatcher is an odd choice, and therefore significant. To tie this to the mind palace further, we then get a shot of Sherlock reflected in the picture of Thatcher as he analyses it – a reflection of him reflecting. In case we forgot what this was actually about.

Sherlock not knowing who Thatcher is – perfectly feasible and actually quite important, although something that I’m not going to resolve until my meta on TFP, because that’s where it comes together for me. But Sherlock playing for time with his further jokes about being oblivious (‘female?’) – that, again, is Sherlock actively playing a caricature of himself. He’s not doing it for fun – he’s doing it to cover up his concern about the smashed ~~elephant in the room~~ Thatcher bust.

The weird thing about the reveal of how Charlie died is that we see what should have happened, if everything had gone right, before we see how he died. I can’t recall this happening in another episode of _Sherlock_ , although I could be wrong. It’s marked by the really noticeable scene transition of crackling television static, as though the signal is cutting out. This is possibly a bit of a reach, but there’s one obvious place where we’ve seen a lot of static before.

Moriarty coming back isn’t what’s supposed to happen. It doesn’t happen in the books. We’re telling the wrong story here. (Bear in mind, from previous chapters, that Jim represents Sherlock’s fear that John’s life is in danger.) Just like Jim returning isn’t the right story, but it’s the one that happened, Charlie’s story isn’t the right story but it’s the one that happened – and indeed, Sherlock needing to save John from a dangerous marriage + suicide is **not** what is supposed to happen – John and Mary are supposed to be married for good (until she dies) in canon. A whole load of false endings – new stories superseding old ones. Mofftiss has an idea that there’s a new story that’s going to be told, and our strongest canon divergence is the end of s3, when we get into the EMP – and from thereon in to TAB it’s off the deep end, and the same is seen here. That TV static is talking about a new medium for a new age and their refusal to deal with established canon norms. Just in case we didn’t remember, outside in the porch we even get a visual reminder of the TV static with a second’s flashback to ‘Miss Me?’ Bad news is, that means Sherlock Holmes rejecting the norms he’s been given (feasibly represented by the hyperbolic nuclear family here) and instead… dying in his mind palace. Less fun. Carl Powers died too. Sherlock still hasn’t got there quite yet – let’s hope he doesn’t.

The next scene is, I think, very important. We come across Mycroft in a dark room with a tiny bit of light – this is really odd, as the obvious place to put Mycroft would be the Diogenes Club. Yet, although clearly more modern, this reminds me most of all of the room we meet Mycroft in in TAB.

The colour palette is the same as the TAB room, and the similar chunks of light falling through suggest that we’re in the same place. The light is designed to mirror that of the Diogenes Club in TAB as well – there is a unity in all these Mycroft’s that we shouldn’t miss. Here I can’t imagine I’m the first one to notice that the light in Mycroft’s office is designed to look like a chessboard, which was an important motif in the promotional pictures for s4. Chess is associated with Sherlock’s brain through Mycroft, most notably in THE where it is contrasted with Operation which represents their emotional (in)capacities. So here we are – Mycroft is the brain, if we didn’t already know, and Sherlock has gone to speak to his brain alone much like he did in TAB. Mycroft has already been associated with the queen a lot; they meet in Buckingham Palace in ASiB, where there is a jibe about Mycroft being the queen of England – we can see here in Sherlock’s head that the brain’s power is vastly reduced by comparing these two episodes. The first time we see Mycroft in connection to the Queen we go to the most famous building in the UK. The second time, Sherlock says he’s going to the Mall, which is the street that Buckingham Palace is on, so we are led to expect a reprisal – and instead come here. There is still a picture of the queen on the wall, but apart from that we are in the darkest room of the show so far, whose grating makes it look under siege. Mycroft’s power in Sherlock’s head is vastly reduced, and indeed the brain’s influence (represented by the queen) over Sherlock’s character is waning as Sherlock struggles to come to terms with his emotional identity.

[Crack/tenuous theory: when Sherlock asks John if he is the king of England in s3, in the drunk knee grope scene, this shows that his brain’s control over his emotions have slipped; references to the queen in relation to Mycroft before have shown that Sherlock does know about the royal family, so this has to metaphorically refer to his own psyche and letting go of his brain’s anti-emotion side. Like I say, crack. But I believe it.]

Again, if we weren’t sure about Mycroft representing the brain without the heart, his rejection of the baby photos is sending out a clear message of juxtaposition with John, who represents the heart. We also shouldn’t fail to notice the water coming over Sherlock’s face again as he struggles to recognise what is important about this. This comes as he is trying to recognise what is important about the Thatchers case. I’m going to try to lay it out as best I can here.

We’ve been through what Thatcher represents to queer people of Sherlock’s age, so there’s already a strong metaphor for homophobia being smashed there. However, let’s look at the AGRA memory stick being uncovered. We know ([X](https://thewatsonbeekeepers.tumblr.com/post/618469147393818624/tsot-meta)) that Sherlock deduced his feelings for John as he was marrying Mary, and so having the smashing of the Thatcher bust at the AGRA memory stick reveal is pretty devastating metaphorically. Why does Sherlock constantly think Moriarty is involved? Well, HLV tells us that the Jim in Sherlock’s mind is his darkest fear – and he’s originally tied up in Sherlock’s mind when he’s first shot, but he pretty quickly gets loose. That darkest fear is exactly what Jim says in that episode: ‘John Watson is definitely in danger’. The reason we bring Jim in to represent this is part of deconstructing the myth of Sherlock Holmes. The whole concept of an arch enemy is made fun of in the show, and rightly so; Moriarty himself tells the Sir Boastalot story which lines Sherlock up with that ridiculous heroic tradition that he’s set himself into, which isn’t what Sherlock Holmes is really about at all. Holmes has never really been particularly invested in individual criminals (although there are exceptions – Irene Adler, for example) – the time he gets most het up is The Three Garridebs, as we all know, when he thinks Watson is dying. It’s his greatest fear, and it’s also what Jim threatens, so Jim has become a proxy for that – and to understand that Sherlock Holmes is **not** the great Sherlock Holmes of the last hundred years, we have to get under and beyond Jim. Hence what we’re about to see. It’s not Jim, it’s Mary – and this is in very real terms, because Mary’s assassination attempt on Sherlock has left John in danger – but Sherlock won’t put the pieces together until the end of this episode, as we will see.

We should also pause over Mycroft asking Sherlock whether he’s having a premonition – Mycroft is laughing at the concept of Sherlock being able to envisage the future here, which we should remember when it comes to the frankly ludicrous plot of the next episode. Much like the much commented upon “it’s not like it is in the movies” which is there to undermine TST, this line is here to undermine TLD and point out the fact that it can’t possibly be real.

Sherlock describes predestination as like a spider’s web and like mathematics – both of these are to do with Moriarty. In the original stories, Moriarty is a mathematician, and one of the most famous lines from both the stories and the show describes Moriarty as a spider. This predestined future is one that Sherlock doesn’t like – Mycroft points out that predestination ends in death, which is what Sherlock is trying to avoid in this episode, and although Moriarty is never mentioned explicitly, his inflection here suggests that Sherlock is thinking about John subconsciously, without even understanding it. The Samarra discussion brings us back to the question of Sherlock’s death, and links it in with the deep waters of the mind he’s currently drowning in – the pirate imagery becomes really important here, because a pirate is someone who stays alive on the high seas and fights against them. The merchant of Samarra becoming a pirate is not merely a joke about a little boy, it’s a point about fighting for survival – and how will Sherlock later fight for survival? We’ll see him battle Eurus (his trauma, more on that later) head on, literally describing himself as a pirate. Fantastic stuff.

The scene transition where all of the glass breaks and then we cut to a background of what looks like blue water is a motif that runs through this entire episode – we’re smashing down walls in Sherlock’s mind, most particularly the Thatcher wall of 1980s homophobia, and indeed the first picture we see is that of the smashed bust.

Moving on – before we go back to Baker Street, there’s a shot of the outside – that features a mirror, reflecting back on 221B in a distorted, twisted way. Another mirror that is wrong – we’re reflecting in an alternate reality. These images keep popping up. It’s echoed in Sherlock’s deduction a few seconds later – by the side of his chair is what looks like either a car mirror or a magnifying glass, possibly the one from the Charlie scene, distorting his arm. It’s placed to look like a magnifying glass, whether it is or not, which ties in with the classic image of Holmes – but that image is distorted, remember.

Others have pointed out that when Sherlock falsely deduces that the client’s wife is a spy working for Moriarty, he should really be talking to John – and, in fact, this is another proof that this isn’t really, because otherwise this is pretty touchy stuff to be making light of in front of John. Instead, let’s remember this is Sherlock’s Mind Palace – John isn’t John here. What Sherlock does a lot in s4 – and nowhere more than the finale of TST – is displace a lot of his real world problems onto other people because he cannot handle the emotional impact of them, and that’s what he’s doing here. He’s trying to come to terms with the danger that Mary poses, but he can’t do it with John – hence why this scene has a John substitute, because that’s what the client is.

Note that the red balloon is over the Union Jack cushion, reminding us that this scene is about John in danger (see this post [X](https://thewatsonbeekeepers.tumblr.com/post/618711183346794496)). However, what’s important here is that Sherlock has got it wrong. He’s currently trying to work out why what has just happened with Mary poses so much danger, and he’s imagining Mary as the worst threat he possibly could – in a word, this Mary is a supervillain. But Mary is not a supervillain; he’s got this all wrong, and even as he says it, it’s completely ridiculous. This is not the danger Mary poses – and so out the door the client goes, and we’re back to square one, trying to work out exactly why John is in so much danger.

I’m not going to pause over the next moment of importance for too long because many have covered it – let’s just notice that Sherlock’s face is overlaid with a smashed Thatcher bust, and remind ourselves that these are the walls of homophobia in Sherlock’s brain. Also note that this matches the half-face overlay of the water in the previous scene, linking the two (although the scene with Ajay later will cement that anyway).

Next up: Craig and his dog. Nothing can be said about dogs that hasn’t be said in these wonderful metas by @sagestreet ([X](https://sagestreet.tumblr.com/sherlockmeta)). Nevertheless, let’s note that this dog is coloured the same as Redbeard, and Mary (a Sherlock mirror in this episode, and in this scene – their clothing matches, and their joining of skillsets to exclude John is the link that has always united them as mirrors) compares John to the dog. We know from the metas linked above that dogs are linked to queerness in the show, but let’s remember that John here is not John – John represents Sherlock’s own heart. It’s going to take longer than this for Sherlock to acknowledge John’s queerness. I don’t think Toby the dog is that important – instead, this is foreshadowing for the more significant dog to come in TFP. The dog also allows for another bit of self-parody in the show – the close-up on the dog running through chemical symbols and the map link directly back to the chase scene in ASiP, but this time everything is different. We have no clue really what Toby is chasing or what the crime that has been committed is – they’re not even running, they’re walking! All we have are cool, if ridiculous, graphics – and, brought down to style without substance, it’s nothing but comic parody. This is important because the opening of TST is so parodic – we’re back to questioning whether the things that people associate with _Sherlock_ and think they like about _Sherlock_ are the right things. The fact that Toby reaches a dead end here is important – he’s a weird loose end to have hanging through the episode. When things in _Sherlock_ normally tie together so nicely, this is a section which has absolutely no bearing on the rest of the plot other than to look a bit silly. But fundamentally, we’re talking about the superfluity of style and image here; we’ve been talking about it for a long time in relation to previous adaptations, but TST brings it in in relation to _Sherlock_ itself.

Skipping past more bust breakages, the next scene is John and Mary in bed together – and the first thing we see is them, once again, in a mirror. There’s nothing wrong with this mirror (as far as I can tell) – everything seems to be in order! But it doesn’t break the theme of mirrors misreflecting, because this is the scene that introduces unreliable narration on a big level – this is the scene which deliberately excludes John’s texts to E. John and Eurus are gone into in another chapter so we’ll move on again.

Craig’s quote about people being weird for missing the olden days is, of course, crucial to this reading of _Sherlock_. It’s pretty on the nose for a show whose protagonist is idealised in the Victorian age – and sums up Mofftiss’s feelings towards the Vincent Starrett _221B_ poem that I elaborated on in the TAB chapter of this meta: essentially, that it always being 1895 is a very bad thing! Craig’s mockery of this nostalgia puts it into more comprehensible modern terms for us, but it also links Thatcher and 1895 again as pasts to be broken with. It’s also important that Craig says that Thatcher is like Napoleon now – although the titles of most episodes are taken from ACD stories, it’s rare that an explicit reference is made to the link between the titles (nobody mentions scarlet vs. pink in ASiP, for example). This is the first time that I can find that _Sherlock_ shows self-awareness from within the narrative that there are extranarrative stories being played out. I’ve said before that I don’t think Thatcher and Napoleon are a good comparison; whether it is or not, Craig’s reference is actively pulling a metatextual part of Sherlock’s history into his story and forcing him to reckon with it. This is important, because he develops expectations of how this story is going to play out (black pearl of the Borgias) which are wrong – because they’re based on what he has learned to expect of himself as fictional character. We could only have such a reference within the Mind Palace.

For the sake of splitting this meta up to make it readable, I’m going to call time on this half of TST, and we’ll pick it up tomorrow at Jack Sandiford’s house. (Also I don’t know how much text tumblr allows and this is a _long_ document.) Until then!


	7. There's Something About Mary (TST 2/2)

A very funny film – with a very apt title for this chapter!! If you haven’t read the first half of the TST meta, check the previous chapter – we’re jumping straight back in.

Jack Sandiford’s home in Reading could not be talking more about water – Arwel has really excelled himself here. Not only do we have a swimming pool and a Hokusai, but look at the ceiling – I have never seen a ceiling reflect water quite like that. I don’t know if it’s a mirror (!) or another visual effect, but it serves to remind us of where we are – the water is not just below us, but all around. It’s not a case of taking the plunge – we are still drowning.

A moment of appreciation for Sacha Dhawan, whose time on _Sherlock_ was far too short – at least he got _Doctor Who_. Regardless, his first scene is back to parody here. Sherlock’s quip about the polling station is the sort of quip you only see on television, and the fighting that follows is clearly stage fighting. We get Bond-esque drama as they jump into the pool and smash the glass (note the same motif from the Thatcher smashing earlier), but even before that, banging each others’ heads off the surfaces without a scratch is obvious stage fighting and a well known move. It feels more like theatre than TV, and for me it doesn’t work on film. Perhaps I’m being harsh here, but I feel again that we’re moving into a parody of Sherlock Holmes the superhero. We also get several shots during the fight scene where water seems to obscure the lens with its weird refraction of light; I love this, because it’s a jarring reminder that the camera exists, and with that a reminder that this is artificial. It jolts us out of the scene and speaks to its unreality.

Sherlock announces that he has found the black pearl of the Borgias, but of course he hasn’t – it’s the AGRA memory stick. Importantly, the original story ends with the black pearl, so we’re tying back in to the expectation that has been latently set by Craig; here, the show is diverging from canon, and Sherlock doesn’t know what to do about it – his declaration that it’s not possible is literal. This scene gives a perfect parallel to the one in TAB where he attempts to unmask Lady Carmichael only to find Moriarty – he was missing the obvious. Here, we’ve seen already in this episode the serious miscalculation he has made about Moriarty in his brain; he is still treating the Moriarty threat as one of a supervillain. Stealing jewels is something we associate with Moriarty from TRF, but that moment is high camp – it’s the end of the episode between John and Sherlock which is the emotional crux. If we’re focusing on what Jim means in himself, we’re missing the point – and it’s exactly the same here. Sherlock needs to reconceptualise Jim as his fear of losing John, and this is the moment when his brain connects this properly to Mary. Bear in mind that everything that happens after Sherlock is shot in HLV takes place within the EMP, so we know nothing about Mary in reality. The AGRA memory stick doesn’t represent who Mary genuinely is – it represents the great unknown of Mary, the question mark over her head. Never forget, after all, that the original AGRA box from the stories was empty. It’s the same here – our divergence into Mary’s past is untrue. When Sherlock realises that Moriarty is somehow to do with the memory stick, he is realising that his fear of John dying is tied into his confrontation with Mary back in 2014 (!). This moment of realisation drives the rest of the episode to Mary’s death scene, where Sherlock relives his own attempted assassination by Mary (as we’ll see) – this is what he has to figure out. If we need more impetus to realise that what happens in HLV post shooting is wrong, look at Sherlock’s flashback to John and Mary’s reunion in HLV – if we take this show at face value, that simply can’t be right, because Sherlock wasn’t there. The only way to read this is if such a scene took place in Sherlock’s own brain – a kind of fill in the blanks as he tried to excuse Mary, only now realising that she is, in fact, the most serious threat of all.

A dreamscape coincidence takes place behind Ajay in this scene – before we know that he is Ajay, and the A in AGRA, we see the A behind him on the shelf, as though calling it out to us. This world is too interconnected to be real; its whole fabric seems to self-reference.

In case we wanted any more flashing blue light, we see the police sirens flashing in – now as far as I know, police sirens are normally blue and red, but not here. I wonder why. They will be the same, somewhat worryingly, at the end of TFP. Look at how it lights up one half of Sherlock’s face, just like the water did before. Rachel Talalay is really fantastic.

The next thing we get is a flashback to Tbilisi, and the ambassador asking ‘who’s they? Seems we put an awful lot of faith in they’. It’s difficult not to read this as a reflection on tjlc and how most of us have been feeling for years now, whether or not this is intentional! She also says that she’s got something ‘they’ would love, if we ever get out of here: ammo. For ammo, we should pretty much always read ‘amo’, the Latin for I love – this will be very important later, but for now there’s a nice little metaphorical resonance here – if we ever get out of where we’re trapped (Tbilisi, or the dreamscape), the great ‘they’ want amo. Maybe.

We cut out of this flashback into Sherlock standing and thinking to himself. Normally, in the show, that means that what we’ve been seeing is a mind palace construction or a flashback. When the AGRA scene showed, I expected us to cut to Mary explaining it to Sherlock and/or John, because that would explain its flashback nature. But again, it’s Sherlock thinking, which like our previous memories of Mary suggest that none of it is real – it’s a stop gap as he tries to work her out. It could be argued that Sherlock got this info from his glance at the memory stick, but I don’t buy that – the memory stick contains material from before their betrayal, not after.

Ajay’s torture is another way of teasing Amo and the English woman, which will come to fruition later in the episode, so we’ll move through to Sherlock’s meeting with Mary. Mary, at this point, is still just Mary, no mirrors, no nothing, as Sherlock tries to work her out. Notice how he acknowledges that he had been too caught up in Moriarty and the pearl. I also think it’s relevant that the building in which Mary chloroforms (camphors?) Sherlock is a church – this is a subconscious reference to the Sherlock-is-murdered metaphor in TSoT ([X](https://thewatsonbeekeepers.tumblr.com/post/618469147393818624/tsot-meta)). As we’ll later discover in a big way, the one thing that is stopping Sherlock from getting a handle on Mary and the threat she represents is that he can’t acknowledge his love for John as playing a part in this – he can’t understand why love is such an enormous threat. He will get there (at least partially) at the end of TST, but not until then. Just like the Sherlock-is-murdered metaphor in TSoT represents his realisation that he is in love with John, Mary’s attack on him here in a church stops him from getting to the bottom of what is going on with Mary.

The obsession with the memory stick here is important because the memory stick represents the unknown about Mary that Sherlock is trying – and failing – to get to grips with. However, he’s still going about it the wrong way, and we know that from one line of Mary’s: ‘Sherlock the dragon slayer’. We’ve had these references to Sherlock’s ridiculous hero complex before, but this one stands out, because it feels like a throwback – and it is! But, it’s a throwback to:

Mycroft. The smoking scene in HLV. If we wanted to, we could jump back to Sir Boastalot as well, but the original ‘dragon slayer’ quote happens when Mary is nowhere around. There isn’t a way to make this callback work without either saying it’s a ‘coincidence’ (really?) or postulating some sort of dreamscape. Here, the dreamscape works perfectly, because it’s the hero image that Sherlock is working to break in this episode, and these iterations come first from his brain (Mycroft) and secondly from hypothesis Mary – even as he’s trying to crack her in various versions in his mind, his subconscious is warning him that he’s wrong. We moved from supervillain Mary to Mary-who-needs-protecting; neither of these are particularly relevant.

Sherlock’s subconscious even trying to break through Mary is important as she refers to the ghosts of her past – this is a phrase which keeps cropping up from TAB all the way through series 4, but it’s normally used in reference to Sherlock himself. She’s again voicing a motif from the programme that as Mary she can’t possibly know about, but as Sherlock’s subconscious is trying to push Sherlock back on the right track.

Mary drugs Sherlock, and in case we needed another reminder of what that represents and what is stopping Sherlock from progressing, we get a shot of Redbeard and we hear Eurus singing the riddle. See chapter 13 (X) which explains why this is symbolic of gay trauma and needing to fully come to terms with your queerness. When Sherlock wakes up, the transition sound from Redbeard back into grown up Sherlock is a gigantic wave followed by rain. Although Sherlock and Victor have been playing by the water, that wave is far too big to come from that image. When we move outside, there is a dripping sound, and our entire visual is coloured in the dark blue of the promo pictures and that really characterises the underwater aesthetic of s4. This scene has shown us a series of blockages to Sherlock solving his current conundrum, and the wave washing over him is the sound of him being pushed deeper into his mind, not climbing out. We’re a long way from a pirate sailing the seven seas here.

The next transition is fantastic. We see two reflections of Mycroft listing off another meaning of Agra (an Indian city) whilst seemingly looking at each other. The reflections are distorted to be thinner than normal, again pointing to the dreamscape we’re used to by now, but also telling us that Mycroft’s voice is Sherlock’s brain here, reflecting – this is the equivalent of going into his mind palace to work something out, drawing on memories and existing knowledge. However, remember that in real life the memory stick does not exist. So why is Sherlock so keen on deciphering AGRA? Well, the treasure of Agra features in The Sign of the Four, in which Holmes is trying to regain the treasures for Mary but does not (as mentioned before, the Agra box is empty) – but the actual important development is that Watson and Mary become engaged. Agra here is not about the memory stick, much like ammo isn’t about ammunition; it’s a tool for Sherlock to engage with Mary’s past. However, Mycroft referencing the original Agra here suggests that Sherlock is trying to grapple with Mary’s potentially criminal past, and also that he can’t get past who she was supposed to be, as we’ve already seen from HLV (she wasn’t supposed to be like that!). However, it’s also a sign that he’s missing the most important part of The Sign of the Four, which is all the more notable for its importance because the wedding episode is named for it; John’s relationship with Mary is the real occurrence in that story.

Others have pointed out that Gatiss wielding a pen in this scene means that he is speaking at least partially as Mofftiss, not just as brain!Mycroft – hence we have wonderful lines such as mentioning that all the best secret societies have acronyms (cough tjlc cough) and that he hates loose ends. A little reassurance there.

Other moments in this scene are lovely – Sherlock is continually distorted by a mirror on the wall, reminding us that this is him trying to process the hypotheses he is running about Mary in his brain. This brain, as previously mentioned, is under siege, and it’s important then that Mycroft and Sherlock both acknowledge that Sherlock and sentiment are becoming one and the same; TFP is going to be about the brain and the heart learning to work together, rather than against one another, but Mycroft’s disparagement and the underground dungeon he’s living in show that we’re not there just yet.

I confess that Mary’s travel montage bores me somewhat, although I’m tempted someday to go through all the graffiti and montages with a fine tooth comb to see if anything can be come up with. I am, however, running out of time to write this before term starts for me! Let’s jump onto the idea that not even Sherlock Holmes can anticipate the roll of the dice. The theme of Sherlock being able to predict the future comes up a few times in this episode, and I’ve mentioned before how this is a set up for us to doubt the premise of TLD, that he suddenly has quasi-magic predictive powers. Here, he seems to, and then it is immediately undercut, because he says that he placed a tracker inside the memory stick. All very funny – except it doesn’t make sense. I confess I didn’t notice this, but my mum did straight away – if you have a tracker, you can follow someone, but you can’t arrive somewhere before them. It’s not possible. This is an aspect of Sherlock’s predictive power that doesn’t make sense – and we might be able to just about buy it on his ‘mathematical probability’ shtick, except he’s just told us that that’s a load of rubbish. This leaves us in a situation that is impossible – and isn’t too much of a problem, because it’s just a device, but is a huge setup for the impossibility of the next episode. It also speaks to a dreamscape again, because where else are you exactly where you need to be when you need to be there, with no explanation?

The jibe about happy families is a little laboured, but it sets up the idea that Sherlock is starting to work in terms of relationships now rather than seeing things in terms of chess. Think of the chessboard squares in Mycroft’s office – but his deduction partner has now switched to John, who represents his heart, and so he’s starting to get on the right track. Note as well how we’re meant to assume they are playing chess or some equivalently cerebral game before we discover that they’re playing Happy Families; this is the same as the chess/Operation scene in TEH, in which we see the difficulty that the Holmes boys have in accessing their hearts. Now that Sherlock is using heart!John instead of brain!Mycroft, he’s almost there, but still not quite winning due to his unfamiliarity with the situation. Note also yet another distorting mirror in the background of this scene.

The fact that Mary’s real name is not Mary is used to great effect here – it could have just been throwaway, but instead in this scene they actually conceptualise Mary and Rosamund as different people. I read this scene as ‘Mary’ being the name for Watson’s canon wife, and Rosamund being our current Mary – so heart!John saying that he liked Mary is his inability to break with established canon. Simultaneously, however, he says “I used to” – he’s caught in a bind, because that canon breakage is already happening.

This room is lit warmly, quite the opposite to the dark watery colours that we see inside most of this episode – most of the waters take place in Sherlock’s brain, and are epitomised by Mycroft’s office, whereas this scene is warm, the colours one might expect of hearth and home, as heart!John takes precedence for the first time. However, notice the grating and the pattern of light that spreads itself softly over the characters’ clothing – it’s much less obvious than in Mycroft’s office, but it’s still the same chequered pattern. As we move in to TFP and John and Mycroft are tied together, rather than moving apart, we’re going to see that increasingly they are two sides of the same coin, heart and brain. You’ll notice, though, that Mycroft’s grating pattern is more like a chessboard – it’s binary and simplistic, black squares and empty space for white light. The patterns of light in this scene, particularly as we move into the Ajay confrontation, become more complicated – the light is let through in swirls as well as grates, as though heart!John is allowing for much more complexity than brain!Mycroft – which seems to be right, given how much more difficult Sherlock finds Happy Families than chess.

[more tenuous crack: Ajay’s torture has always reminded him of Sherlock’s torture, but he’s sustained every day by this bit of information. Ammo, ammo. Amo, amo. Love? I can dream.]

The following scene is an intercut phone conversation between Sherlock, still in Marrakech, and Mycroft in his office – moving back and forth between the two highlights the difference in colour scheme as well as in the angle of grating, which is similar but almost inverted. However, it’s Sherlock talking to brain!Mycroft rather than heart!John – it’s not a row between the two parts of the psyche, but showing that Sherlock has firmly moved over to the other. That won’t be the answer – they will need to integrate for the end of s4– but this is the way towards working out Mary. The split screen effect is helpful here for us to understand both sides not as different, but taking up the same space. This is heightened when Sherlock and Mycroft both walk off, their silhouettes merging into one – they are one and the same. It’s also important that it is from this space that Sherlock makes the ‘amo’ deduction – he could have done so from anywhere in London, but he doesn’t – he needs to be in a heart space.

We now discover what heart!John meant by “so many lies […] I don’t just mean you” earlier – his not-tryst with Eurus. Again, this is discussed in greater detail in an earlier chapter ([X](https://thewatsonbeekeepers.tumblr.com/post/630515245565280256/chapter-5-hey-soul-sister-who-is-eurus)), but let’s remember the initial mention of it. It was heart!John who spoke those words, not real!John – because we never get real!John in this series, except through Sherlock’s memory – and so his interrogation of Sherlock’s hypothesis of Mary is where he starts to realise that the problem is one of happy families rather than chess, and that it’s a lot more emotionally complicated than the supervillain arc gives credit for. It’s important that we’re told this story in reverse, because Sherlock is slowly picking up the clues for it but only putting it together late. We’ve seen all the signs that John might be unhappy but haven’t elaborated on them – now Sherlock’s mind is noticing that the Mary problem is something to do with John’s emotions. He can’t work out what, so he hypothesises – this meta chapter ([X](https://thewatsonbeekeepers.tumblr.com/post/630515245565280256/chapter-5-hey-soul-sister-who-is-eurus)) goes into much greater detail about how his queer trauma (Eurus) is prodding at his hypothesis of John here, forcing Sherlock to masquerade as a woman in the form of trauma!Eurus because trauma!Eurus will not let him truly accept queer desire and the possibility of reciprocity. It is why we get a story which rings so false about John here. However, I’m running the risk of repeating said chapter, so we’ll move ahead.

We move into brain!Mycroft’s interrogation of Lady Smallwood. The setting is once again focusing on reflection – the mirror behind Lady Smallwood reflects Mycroft, and of course there is the larger mirror structure of an interrogation room, where a mirror from the inside allows Sherlock to watch what’s going on – an obvious metaphor. Lady Smallwood’s opening lines, that Mycroft can’t accuse her again, are really important – in HLV, right before he went down, Sherlock thought that Mary was Lady Smallwood. He’s playing through this mistake – why did he make it? What stopped him from seeing the obvious about Mary, just as he is missing the obvious about Norbury? Both, after all, have been ‘hiding in plain sight’.

Amo. Love, Smallwood’s code name, stopped him from realising it was Norbury, and by extension it’s what stopped him from realising Mary’s true self earlier – love was clouding his judgement. There is more, however. The fact that ‘ammo’ and ‘amo’ are so similar is brilliant, because they mean total opposites – ammo is to do with war, and amo is love. When it comes to the problem of being shot, of knowing that John is in danger but not quite understanding how, Sherlock has been focusing on the threat from ‘ammo’ for too long, hypothesising Mary as some kind of super dangerous villain. This isn’t what’s endangering John. What’s endangering John is ‘amo’ – without Sherlock, John is suicidal, and so it is love that is the ultimate danger. The mistake that Ajay made (ammo) is the same mistake that Sherlock has been making in hypothesising about Mary throughout the episode. Another point worth noting is that gay slang – the early 20th century equivalent for ‘is he a friend of Dorothy?’ is ‘does he know his Latin?’* That’s definitely the sort of thing Mark Gatiss would know and throw in.

[*I found this on tumblr! And can’t refind it! Which makes me question its veracity – although it seems a really odd thing to make up. If anyone can source this for me, would love them forever – I have trawled my files and I foolishly didn’t save it!]

We should also note that amo is a verb – amor is the Latin word for love. ‘Amo’ actually means ‘I love’ – we know that Sherlock knows this, because he conjugates the verb earlier in the episode: amo, amas, amat. My understanding is that it is the first verb anyone learns to conjugate in Latin classes, and that therefore Mofftiss hoped their audience might have some familiarity (rather than picking a much less taught language). ‘I love’ is not the same as ‘love’ – it is an action, and that’s something that Sherlock hasn’t quite cottoned on to. He keeps saying ‘love’ but refuses to grasp that he has to be involved in this verb – as we’ll see.

Mary’s death scene is where all of this – finally! – comes to fruition. Note the blue lighting over the London Aquarium, even the London Eye, to match the underwater aesthetic, before we move into the aquarium. Admittedly, both do that anyway, but it’s a nice look – they didn’t just pick the middle of the day for it.

The message that Sherlock texts Mary, “The stage is set. The curtain rises.” has been seen before – it’s what he says in TAB before running an entire Victorian fever dream of a simulation ([X](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3AZnMHg2vQ)). It’s one of the many repeats of lines from earlier in the Mind Palace, but it suggests that after his almost complete revelation about love, the final simulation is at last ready to run. The comparison to TAB is important, because TAB is a rerunning of Moriarty’s death with different players so that he can understand it. We’ve got the same thing happening here – he’s rereunning his own assassination attempt so that he can finally understand what is going on. This is why TAB is so important – we thought it stood by itself, but it’s actually the key to unlock most of s4! More repeats happen as Sherlock meets Norbury – ‘the final act’ is a repeat, as is ‘I never could resist a touch of the dramatic’, which is mentioned in TAB as well as in ACD canon. Sherlock thinks he’s cracked it, but he’s still quoting previous iterations of himself, which is a sure sign that he’s not being true to Sherlock, only to Holmes, and that something is going to go wrong.

[A side note: can anybody identify/has anybody identified Norbury’s brooch? It looks incredibly significant, a face on it, but I have no idea who – the only person who pops into my head is the queen, and that throws up a lot of ramifications!]

Others have explained why Norbury is a mirror for Mary – if we hadn’t already spotted the Lady Smallwood connection, there’s the fact that they are both receptionists, that they use the exact same gun and of course that they both attempt to kill Sherlock to protect themselves. When we read this scene, we should be reading it in the same way it has become completely mainstream to read Ricoletti as Moriarty; Norbury is Mary. She thought she could outrun the inevitable, but somebody has information on her. What happened with AGRA isn’t actually relevant here, because that was all hypothesis – Magnussen has something, and that’s all that matters. Norbury’s wish to get out of criminal mess in favour of domesticity matches Mary’s, seemingly – and in case we didn’t get this parallel, Norbury draws it herself, asking Mary if they don’t just want the same thing.

Sherlock’s deduction about Norbury here, however, can’t straightforwardly apply to Mary – remember, he knows nothing about Mary’s prior life. This, again, is where TAB comes in – this moment is beautifully metatextual. TAB has set up the train of thought about people who were forgotten by history, and put in women as a mirror for queer people – but in this sense, Mary’s canon divergence is important, because the Mary of the original stories was never allowed to be interesting. Sherlock’s biting comments about Norbury’s ‘little life’ are vicious and completely out of character – think of the interest with which he treats Jeff Hope in ASiP, even a slight sympathy, for another ‘proper genius’ who’s been ignored. Sherlock’s bitterness here is personal. He’s talking about the exclusion of the real Mary from the stories that we saw partially rectified in TAB, whereas in the stories she had a ‘little life’ – but also, using Mary is allowing his subconscious to work away at the fact that the same thing happened to him. His queerness forced him to live a similarly ‘little life’, pining for a lost love much like Norbury, and also buying a cottage down south in the stories (although in Sussex). Canon divergence is working for both Mary and Sherlock here, and he’s trying to understand it through Norbury – the one giveaway is the pain brilliantly infecting Cumberbatch’s voice here. Even if we can’t superficially understand why, we know that this is personal.

Everyone has dug into Mary’s death non stop for the last few years, and I’m not sure I can add too much that is new, but my 2c on how Mary’s death happens is thus. Sherlock has finally come to the point where he can play out Mary shooting him and the impact this has on John, and so Norbury takes the place of Mary in this rerun. Sherlock is, ostensibly, playing himself, but at the very last second he substitutes Mary. Many tjlcers have pointed out that Mary’s leap in front of the bullet contravenes everything Molly Hooper says about gunshots and plays into a movie hero stereotype rather than anything realistic, and I think we’re definitely being pulled into something artificial here. Why does Mary jump in front of Sherlock? Well, let’s think about how trauma!Eurus allows Sherlock to interrogate his feelings for John (and vice versa), both as E and Faith, through a heterosexual lens by being gender swapped. This is a key sign that Sherlock isn’t able to process a queer vision of himself yet. If Norbury had shot Sherlock, which by rights she should have done in this scene, we would have seen John having to come to terms with Sherlock’s death and dealing with it suicidally – which is **exactly** the threat that the shooting in HLV poses. Sherlock can’t emotionally process this yet, so at the very last moment he throws Mary in front of the bullet – because technically, in this shooting, John loses Mary as well. He at least loses the Mary he thought he knew. And so, at the last minute, Sherlock reverts to the superhero Sherlock Holmes story mindset which is devoutly heterosexual and devoutly heroic, and pulls his punch. He refuses to acknowledge the _I love_ part of ‘amo’, only the love. And whilst imagining that John is suicidal, he hypothesises that it is from losing Mary. By the end of TLD, Sherlock’s going to figure out that he was very wrong. But this is why Norbury doesn’t just shoot Mary – that in itself would be enough drama, and it could have created a conflict scene which was really worthy of Amanda Abbington’s dramatic capabilities – the bullet needs to almost hit Sherlock before his mind diverts it back into this incredibly flawed vision of what a Sherlock Holmes story should look like.

An important note, therefore, is that John in this moment is one of the only times we see hypothesis!John rather than heart!John – because Sherlock is trying to understand the danger John is in. It is truly heartbreaking to hear Martin Freeman’s cries here, and the more so to imagine that this is Sherlock’s dying understanding of what John is going through.

Others have pointed out the fantastic projector visual that we get next, as though implying that the whole Aquarium scene is a projection from Sherlock’s mind – it’s important to hint here to the audience that Mary is of course not dead, although because of the reception of series 4 I’m not sure that was entirely grasped! Mary’s coffin is then engulfed in blue flames, in case we weren’t encumbered enough in blue, but there’s also a sense of failure in this. Every time we get that level of blue, waves or fire, engulfing like it so often does in this episode, we’re sinking deeper into the subconscious rather than rising out of it. It’s a hint that something has gone terribly wrong, which is only increased at the end of the episode with the notorious final image of Sherlock drowning. We’re not on our way up here, and we aren’t going to be until the final third of TFP – until then, we have a constant aesthetic of descent into the mind.

The exception, of course, is Ella’s office, which ties into the heaven/ascent theme – it seems as though descent is descent into drowning in thought, but it’s not actually death, whereas death is the abandonment of the EMP project all together, letting it all go to rise up to the sky. I’ve discussed the ascent metaphor in a previous chapter ([X](https://thewatsonbeekeepers.tumblr.com/post/630215578289864704/chapter-2-look-up-here-im-in-heaven-the)) so there’s not a great need to go into Sherlock’s therapy session here. Instead, let’s note a final few things – although Sherlock is tempted to let it all go, thinking there’s nothing he can do to save John from his loss of Mary (Ella therapy scene) he can’t stop his heart from reflecting – John walking around a room with a reflection of dark blue curtains on an immensely reflective table.

A table that also seems to have a cup of tea on it, which represents queer desire. This is the reason he can’t let it go, although his subconscious is still talking to him in symbols. Another important aesthetic is Mycroft looking at the 13th post-it note and then glancing at a time piece – discussed here ([X](https://jenna221b.tumblr.com/post/155301497360/we-see-the-13th-post-it-note-on-mycrofts/amp)), this is really significant and so obvious as a code that my casual family spotted it (although knowing how to crack the code was beyond most of us, an excellent piece of work by @jenna221b). Mycroft’s fridge is also unnecessarily shiny and reflective, so now we’ve seen that neither the brain or the heart is giving up just yet, and as to be discussed in a later chapter, brain!Mycroft’s final recourse to Sherrinford symbolises moving into the deepest part of Sherlock’s psyche to solve this problem – and the most guarded.

We move back to Baker Street, where we’ve lost heart!John, because Sherlock has denied him. Substitute John is still there, though – the red balloon exists, deflated, weighed down by some books. Books normally represent ACD canon in this show, so it’s not difficult to see the balloon – John in Sherlock’s mind – weighed down by canon expectation of him.

The ‘say the words Norbury to me’ line is taken almost directly from _The Adventure of the Yellow Face_ (not as bad as it sounds!). This story is actually anti-racism, though you’d never tell from the title – it’s about a woman who isn’t allowed to see her mixed race child, and it concludes by reuniting them. The Norbury line comes at the end – Sherlock has seen the mysterious yellow face and overdeduced by a million to think that he’s solving a murder case, when all the disguise is is a woman trying to see her child. This is the same mistake Sherlock has made in his characterisation of his assassination attempt in the Norbury scene – he hasn’t been able to see past his role as consulting detective into the more important world of human relationships, which would have saved us an entire series of dreams for starters. It’s a really important moment in the Holmes canon, as it’s one of the only moments where we see behind the mask – much like _The Three Garridebs_ – and it’s vital here in linking our real Sherlock back to the stories, as though to say that he is hidden in there somewhere.

Mary showing up on a Miss Me? DVD raises the question of how the hell it got there – dream logic, fine. All a bit _Forest of the Dead_ , but it is Steven Moffat. This ties together really nicely at the end and gives us hope that Sherlock isn’t at a complete dead end – Jim Moriarty, who was always back, representing the threat to John Watson, has now taken a much more concrete form in the form of Mary. Mary is the reason John is in danger. Sherlock knew this already, but going up nearly to heaven in the form of Ella, he thought there was nothing he could do – here Sherlock’s subconscious is once again in this episode prodding him through Mary as it will through Eurus, pointing out that he can change things. Mary’s DVD is intercut with Sherlock’s visit to John’s house – is it a coincidence that there are inverted hearts on the railings? (Invert being a euphemism for queer that this fandom is long used to.) Sherlock’s subconscious is crying out to him!! The anyone but you stuff is much more relevant to TLD, so we’ll leave it for then. Mary’s video continues in audio overlaid over Sherlock – others have pointed out that she repeats lines, but the inflection is different – it’s like a dream memory, not a recording, where using just one recording would really have been a lot easier for the editing team. Again, the show is playing with inconsistency, unsettling us.

And finally, the much discussed ending to this show – death waits for all of us, but can it be avoided – as London turns into the water which drowns out Benedict Cumberbatch’s face. We’re only going deeper.

That’s it this time! I’ll see you for our next chapter.


	8. Dream a Little Dream of Me: Parallels with Doctor Who

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As you can all tell, I'm sure, I still can't add images to ao3, which is entirely my own incompetence. You can contact me for the word doc, or you can find it on my tumblr blog if you want the images too. They don't add much, however, as my own incompetence stopped me finding images for all the moments I wanted to!

What’s queer film and TV without [a bit of Doris Day](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7j8wa9sWOE) in your chapter title?

This was never intended to be a chapter by itself, but having seen @tjlcisthenewsexy’s fantastic video on Wholock parallels here [X](https://tjlcisthenewsexy.tumblr.com/post/625564927683428352/i-set-out-just-to-do-the-tarmac-parallel-but-i) I had to start writing. Full credit for inspiration here to @tjlcisthenewsexy, who has definitely had many of these ideas independently, and I would fully recommend watching the video before you read this. I personally only really buy Moffat era Who as a direct parallel to Sherlock, largely because Moffat wrote both, but also because 2010-17 matches up exactly with our boys. Lots of people have drawn parallels between 2005’s Bad Wolf Bay scene (by Russell T Davies) and the tarmac scene – those parallels are definitely there, but I think they’re more due to common tropes in love-declaration scenes than from intent.

The _Doctor Who_ episodes I’m largely going to be drawing on here are _Amy’s Choice_ , _Last Christmas_ , _The Name of the Doctor_ and _A Good Man Goes to War_. Others will feature, but if you want a really strong grip on what I’m talking about, I’d recommend taking a look at all of these, or at the very least _Amy’s Choice_! But now – on with the show.

 _Time travel has always been possible in dreams_. This line comes from _The Name of the Doctor_ , which came out in 2013. The dream in question is a psychic telepathy connecting five of our main characters whilst they sleep, controlled by Madame Vastra. Much has been made of Madame Vastra being an explicit Sherlock mirror ([X](https://jenna221b.tumblr.com/post/157335486875/looking-back-jenny-vastra-foreshadowing-the)) with Jenny as her wife and explicit John mirror, so using a dream state to connect people across time should already ring TAB bells. But crucially, we’re not just focusing on telepathy here – we’re focusing on the ability of 19th century characters to use a dream state to connect with the 21st century. Given that we never see where River Song is connecting from, it’s safe to say that it is the 19th – 21st connection between the other characters that is important, like in TAB. The use of the word ‘always’ is really important here – it’s not saying that time travel is possible in dreams in the Whoniverse, but that it has always been possible. There’s an implication here that before time travel was invented, in a non science fiction world, dreams can still do this – and that’s what helps us to jump across to TAB.

In the dream sequence in _TNotD_ , Jenny is supposed to lock up before they go into their trance, but she forgets. Intruders break in, but because Jenny and Vastra are unconscious they can’t defend themselves and so Jenny is murdered. This is the spur for everybody to wake up, to save themselves. Pretty much all of our dream states in Doctor Who are focused on the possibility of dying in the outside world, but _TNotD_ is the one which articulates the problem of EMP theory most specifically. Jenny, our John mirror, dies because her protector’s unconsciousness means that she can’t protect her wife. (Vastra’s Silurian abilities very much put her into the role of protector here – she could save Jenny where Jenny couldn’t save herself, and frequently does.)

Between the time travel and Jenny, then, TNoTD is probably the best framework we get set up for TAB. This came out only a few months before s3, in which EMP began, so it’s safe to say that these ideas are well-formed in Mofftiss’s heads at this stage. However, if we jump all the way back to 2010 and _Amy’s Choice_ , we can see that this has been in the works for a lot longer.

The first point of note here is the casting of Toby Jones as the Dream Lord.

Casting the same actor to play dream merchants, knocking characters unconscious and altering their memories and psyches? The universe is rarely so lazy. Other mirrors in this episode are easy to pull out. The Doctor and Sherlock have long been read as mirrors for each other – characters who have existed for a long time and are constantly evolving through adaptation, super-intelligent loners, but in case that wasn’t obvious, Moffat went to a reasonable effort to style them very similarly when both tenures began.

Both of these are very conscious remodellings of old characters. Much was made of Matt Smith being the youngest Doctor ever (26!), and Cumberbatch’s youth set him apart from the Rathbone/Brett image in everybody’s heads. There’s something young and modern here – but both still dress like they’re slightly ‘out of their time’, which of course they are. Coming to terms with modernity is the central challenge that Sherlock is going to have to face. And then, of course, there’s the hair – instantly recognisable to the character in both cases, yet remarkably similar.

If the Doctor and Sherlock are mirrors, Amy as the Doctor’s companion should be linked to John. Amy ran away on the night before her wedding, and whilst she is reasonably happy with Rory in the long term of the series, this episode is about her making the decision between domesticity and adventure – a pretty clear link to John in s3 and 4. This episode is particularly important for TST however, because Amy is heavily pregnant in the domestic dream – but she is far from enthused, torn between domestic life with Rory and wanting to run off with the Doctor. However, I grant the similarity with Martin Freeman isn’t striking.

Do note, however, the similarly uncomfortable dynamic in both of these photos – hilarious.

The parallel dream!verses created broadly represent John’s dilemma from TST, and if we followed _Amy’s Choice_ as it seems on the surface, we would end up with a pretty straight reading of TST – John spends too much time with Sherlock, they’re all in danger, Mary dies and John is suicidal because of it. Broadly speaking, this works – Rory is killed in the dream (with a really nice visual parallel to TST) and Amy crashes a bus and kills herself because she doesn’t want to live without Rory. Amy picks the domestic sphere and although it takes several more series to play out in full, this is broadly the direction the series takes us in.

In both scenes, Sherlock and the Doctor are left standing off to the right, unsure of what to do – if you watch both scenes in parallel, it’s striking. There’s a great article here talking about how the angle demonstrates the Doctor to be powerless for the first time, amongst other things. [X](https://acephalous.typepad.com/acephalous/2012/02/doctor-who-amys-choice-rhetorical-film-analysis.html) Amy asks the Doctor what is the point of him, and John’s declaration that Sherlock has broken his vow carries similar weight – they were supposed to save them.

The title of the episode is _Amy’s Choice_ , and this, we’re led to believe, is the moment when Amy chooses Rory. I don’t believe this. The Doctor/Rory conflict goes on for a lot longer than this, and it’s far too early in their first series to resolve it. It would leave a lot of later episodes without nearly so much tension. It’s true that Amy does have some agency in choosing – the science is questionable, as the Doctor says they’ve all tapped into some space LSD equivalent from an unmentioned offscreen adventure which has induced a mutual psychic trance, which means that we’re not sure how much agency each of the characters has in this dream. It’s not seeded, and so it sounds like a fudge – deliberately. Because a pseudoscientific explanation like this can’t explain the Dream Lord himself, Amy and Rory point out, and the Doctor admits that the Dream Lord, the architect of the dreams themselves, was actually the Doctor’s psyche. The space LSD sounded like a fudge – and Amy and Rory expose that it wasn’t just a fudge on Moffat’s part, it was a fudge on the Doctor’s part.

And, crucially, what was the first thing the Doctor said about domestic!dream, long before he realised he created it?

_“Oh, you’re okay. Oh, thank God. I had a terrible nightmare about you two. That was scary. Don’t ask. You don’t want to know. You’re safe now.”_ [ _X_ ](http://www.chakoteya.net/DoctorWho/31-7.htm)

Later, when asked how he knew that the Dream Lord was him, the Doctor merely says that no one else hates him so much. Domestic!verse, then, is a manifestation of everything that the Doctor dreads – it’s his worst nightmare, being conjured by his subconscious. That nightmare involves Amy’s suicide, Rory’s death because the Doctor can’t protect them – this maps pretty neatly onto EMP theory and TST. Although John doesn’t kill himself, he is rendered suicidal in the domestic nightmare that is left behind. As the previous chapter discusses, Sherlock not being able to protect John is definitely a nightmare, but the nightmare also maps onto reality – John is suicidal, but he’s struggling to work out why, so he has to construct it through a heterosexual lens. John’s potential death and love for Mary are the two things that form the worst nightmare in both dreams, and the nightmarish sense is highlighted in TST by the deep waters metaphor.

At the very end of the episode, the Doctor’s reflection is still the Dream Lord, suggesting that this isn’t some psychic drug phenomenon, an explanation which was frankly crap. The Doctor’s dark side is still inside him. This feels like an allegory for mental illness, and mental illness crops up aplenty in Moffat’s depictions of the Doctor, particularly the later we get – the seeds of it are here. Again, although Sherlock is being killed rather than killing himself, we have seen the suicidal side of him before and it is made clear in TAB that his opinion of himself is low. EMP s4 is about him coming to terms with how he views himself, and the cognitive dissonance that we see in Amy’s Choice is a nice separation of the psyche in two that foreshadows the immense splintering that’s going to come in EMP, but particularly between John, Mycroft and Eurus.

Another nice parallel between s4 and _Amy’s Choice_ is the idea of predictability. Way before we know that this is the Doctor’s dream, the Doctor displays a remarkable ability to finish what the Eknodines say before they do, an ability which becomes an obvious hint in hindsight. Moving over to TLD, Sherlock has similarly ridiculous powers to predict what other people will do; because this underpins TLD, it jumps out as being something that rings very false to me, almost like a parody of who Sherlock Holmes is meant to be, and so we should pay attention to it. An uncanny ability to predict what others will do – yup, that’s a dream world.

One key similarity that _Amy’s Choice_ has with EMP theory is that a false dream premise is set up in both. _Amy’s Choice_ suggests that there are two worlds, and only one is a dream; their survival depends on recognising which is the real one. This is, of course, a lie – both worlds are dreamed, and that false premise is created to trap them in the Doctor’s psyche, presumably until the Doctor dies (although the threat is never clearly explained). TAB sets up a real world in the form of the modern day and a false Victorian age, but the supernatural graveyard scene is the first hint that the reality/dream binary is not real, just like _Amy’s Choice_. This one scene is not an anomaly – the chronology of the ‘man out of my time’ scene coming _after_ Sherlock gets off the tarmac suggests that such mixing is still going on, and we shouldn’t trust our senses. In case that point needed hammering any more, however, Steven Moffat gave us _A Good Man Goes To War._

This episode is the culmination of a series in which Amy is actually an almost-person, and Amy has been dreaming all of their adventures with a flesh avatar actually having them with Rory and the Doctor. Here it is Amy, rather than the Doctor, who is dreaming, which is a little ambiguous, but there are two key aspects that parallel _Amy’s Choice_. The first is that, like _Amy’s Choice_ , the flesh avatar/dream person threat doesn’t just go away. These words of Madame Kovarian are extremely important:

 _Fooling you once was a joy, but fooling you twice, the same way? It’s a privilege._ [X](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKq0s0KUGbU)

Exactly what the Dream Lord does in _Amy’s Choice_. Furthermore, although there’s a later meta in blindness across _Doctor Who_ and _Sherlock_ which at some stage really needs writing, many people have made the point that Sherlock is associated with blindness throughout series 4, and so we should note that the architect of the dream people/flesh avatars is Madame Kovarian, better known (and usually credited) as the Eyepatch Lady. However, there’s one other key message they’re giving us, which comes at the end of the clip linked above – the baby’s not real. Both _Amy’s Choice_ and _A Good Man Goes To War_ feature Amy’s child, and in both cases the plot revolves around the emotional recognition that that world isn’t real. Given that we know that Amy is a John mirror, and that her choice between the domestic and the adventurous is consistently paralleled to John’s choice in _Sherlock_ , this is a pretty huge indicator that something is up with Rosie even if we didn’t know it already. Indeed, the cot and mobile that the child has in _Amy’s Choice_ are similar to Rosie’s. That baby never stood a chance.

The last episode I want to briefly invoke is _Last Christmas_. If we’re looking for dreams, this episode really goes above and beyond. The premise is that there is an alien species called the dream crab which latches onto your face and dissolves your brain whilst putting you in a dream so that you don’t notice. To make this more confusing, it often places dreams within dreams to confuse you – whilst you’re dying. This episode came out on Christmas Day 2014, so a year after series 3 aired but before TAB, so in Sherlock-time we’ve just entered the mind palace. The title, _Last Christmas_ , is pretty helpful here I think – of course it has relevance within the episode, but this episode should also get us thinking about what was going on this time last year, when Sherlock was airing.

We’re no stranger to dreams within dreams at this stage, but it’s interesting how the saving-the-companion vibe is still going strong here. Ostensibly, that’s not what the episode is about at all – it’s a classic everyone-trapped-on-a-base-working-together episode, but the last five minutes tacked on the end suggests that it’s far more about the Doctor’s relationship with Clara, the episode’s companion, than one might think. In this clip ([X](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6kSQfzYFWKM)) the Doctor thinks he’s broken out of the final dream but goes back to visit Clara and realises that she is now old, and that he’s missed her life. It culminates in him apologising for getting it wrong, for not coming for her in time, for failing her; we get more of this with Clara’s actual death later in the show, but given that it’s a kid’s show and Christmas, this scene is a touch lighter than that. It’s then that Father Christmas comes in to tell the Doctor that he’s still dreaming, he can still save her – and his first word when he wakes up is “Clara”. None of the others trapped in the dream have needed his help to wake from the vision and survive; Clara, who as the companion is our John mirror, specifically needs saving, and the Doctor needs to wake up from his dream within a dream to do that.

Nick Frost’s appearance as Father Christmas gave us all a good laugh, but he was also used as the indicator that the world we were perceiving was a dream world. This was made a bit of a joke of early in the episode – in a sci-fi world like this, are we seriously looking for what’s not realistic as the code to crack the dream? The exact same joke is made in _Amy’s Choice_ , and here we’re hitting a pretty silly version of the show where they joke that just about the only character who can’t be real is Father Christmas. These hints about looking for what’s not real, though, should be taken as just that – hints. From the emergence of ‘something’s fucky’ theories early on in s4, this has been the abiding reasoning for the various forms of EMP theory that have sprung up, and they’re not wrong. However, if I had to put my money on a figure like Santa Claus, something iconic which functions as a kind of dream thermometer, I’d be guessing:

You were there before me. The fucky skull that glows, almost like a warning that this is too mad. Crucially, in _Last Christmas_ they explain that Santa is a warning that your brain is sending you, picking the most unbelievable thing possible so that you know you’re trapped, dying in your brain. Santa Claus? Well, it’s a kid’s show, and it’s Christmas. But if I were picking a dream siren to tell me I was dying, I like to think that my subconscious would pick the glowing skull on the wall; without explanation, it’s an awful lot more direct. 

There is more reference than necessary made to dream crabs making one blind, and between Madame Kovarian and the blind Doctor in the later dream episode _Extremis_ , there’s a lot more to unpack there, but I’m going to leave that for sometime down the line, or for someone else to jump into if they would like. I also want to throw out a thought I haven’t quite come to terms with yet – the elephant in the room in _Amy’s Choice._ Arwel Wyn Jones would be proud of the script for _Amy’s Choice_ – twice, it mentions the elephant in the room, and so I feel I have to do the same. The first time, you could blink and miss it – the Doctor calls pregnant Amy ‘elephanty’. But the second time, we get this exchange:

_DOCTOR: Now, we all know there’s an elephant in the room._

_AMY: I have to be this size, I’m having a baby._

_DOCTOR: No, no. The hormones seem real, but no. Is nobody going to mention Rory’s ponytail? You hold him down, I’ll cut it off?_ [ _X_ ](http://chakoteya.net/DoctorWho/31-7.htm)

The elephant in the room – that the baby’s not real? Possibly, but not what we normally take it to mean. Rory’s ponytail also has not shaving for Sherlock Holmes vibes, but again it’s not quite concrete in my mind. These little bits at the end aren’t quite tied up, and I would love to hear what people have to say about them. That, however, is for another day! The next chapter in this series will be jumping back into episode-by-episode analysis with TLD – see you there.


End file.
